On Kim Scott: Writers on Writers

By Tony Birch

An illuminating essay on the bestselling Noongar writer and author of the Miles Franklin Award–winning novels Benang and That Deadman Dance

'I value Kim Scott's fiction so highly because I feel that his approach is to put the flags aside. That Deadman Dance asks us not to consider who we were so much as who we could be, collectively, in the future.'

Noongar writer Kim Scott has won the Miles Franklin Award twice for his novels. In this moving essay, Tony Birch shows how Scott uses fiction as a pathway to truth. We meet a writer who 'inhabits a range of guises, faces he wears to interrogate the complex and messy frontier history of colonial encounters'. The result is 'new stories' for the nation. This, says Birch, is the work that Kim Scott has been doing for many years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: Apr 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9781743823545

Tony Birch

Tony Birch is the author of three novels: the bestselling The White Girl, winner of the 2020 NSW Premier’s Award for Indigenous Writing, and shortlisted for the 2020 Miles Franklin literary prize; Ghost River, winner of the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing; and Blood, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2012. He is also the author of Shadowboxing and four short story collections, Dark As Last Night, Father’s Day, The Promise and Common People; and the poetry collections, Broken Teeth and Whisper Songs. In 2017 he was awarded the Patrick White Literary Award for his contribution to Australian literature. Tony Birch is also an activist, historian and essayist. His website is: tony-birch.com

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