UQP acquires new poetry collection from Stella Prize winner Evelyn Araluen
UQP is delighted to announce that we’ve acquired a new poetry collection from Evelyn Araluen, author of the Stella Prize-winning Dropbear, which has now sold over 25,000 copies. Evelyn’s new collection, The Rot, dramatises the bad faiths and strategic abjections of the ‘sad girl’ aesthetic, romancing the lost hopes and unfulfilled dreams of girlhood under terminal-stage capitalism.
UQP has acquired world rights and will publish in September 2025.
Publisher Aviva Tuffield says:
‘I could not be more excited that there is a new poetry collection on the way from Evelyn Araluen, not least because Evelyn had declared that she didn’t intend to write more poetry. It turns out that poetry was not done with her. The new poems that Evelyn has shared – and performed – to date are magnificent and have received incredible receptions from readers and festival audiences alike. Evelyn is one of a kind, and I am constantly in awe of her fierce intellect, unwavering political consciousness and coruscating use of language.’
Evelyn Araluen says:
‘I didn’t think I would ever write another poem after completing Dropbear – I never anticipated the popularity and reception of my weird little pink book, and I’ll admit I’ve struggled to return to the form for fear of disappointing everyone who has been so supportive of my work. Watching a genocide unfold on our phones and feeling so powerless has reminded me of the galvanising and revolutionary power of poetry, and the simultaneous necessity and insufficiency of witnessing. It’s strange but electrifying to be writing poetry again: The Rot is a romance of lost objects and expired hopes, a study in the abject injustices of the world we are all complicit in. I believe poetry must refuse to avert its gaze from the dying of Country, from those who are dying on or displaced from their Country, and the mass dying in Gaza. I’ve spent years swallowing more rage than I can console or ironise – I don’t know if poetry will ever be enough, but I’m writing what I can in the hope that my work can put even a fraction of our collective grief into words.’
About Evelyn Araluen
Evelyn Araluen is a Goorie and Koori poet, researcher and co-editor of Overland Literary Journal. Her widely published criticism, fiction and poetry has been awarded the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, a Wheeler Centre Next Chapter Fellowship, and the Melbourne Prize Career Progress Award. Evelyn's debut collection, Dropbear, was shortlisted for the 2021 QLA Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a Poetry Collection and the 2022 NSW Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, and won the 2022 Stella Prize.
