Indigenous Literature Week 2019

Cultural warning: Indigenous Australians are advised that some references in this blog may include images or names of people now deceased.

Lisa @ANZ LitLovers will again be hosting Indigenous Literature Week in July to coincide with NAIDOC Week here in Australia (7th to 14th July). Please visit her page for all the details.

This is a week when Australians celebrate the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and this year the NAIDOC Week theme is Voice, Treaty, Truth. This theme acknowledges that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have always wanted an enhanced role in decision-making in Australia’s democracy.

ANZ LitLovers’ contribution to NAIDOC Week is to celebrate all forms of Indigenous Writing, and she hopes that many readers will join in and read a book by an Indigenous author.

I have a few possibilities:

• I will attempt to finish a book of poems, Blakwork by Alison Whittaker (I’m absorbing them, savouring them very slowly. There's a lot to contemplate.) 
• Maybe Stan Grant’s Australia Day.
• Or maybe my ARC of Claire Coleman’s new book, The Old Lie.
• There are a few essays & short stories in the Griffith Review #63 Writing the Country.
• Meanjin A-Z: Fine Fiction 1980 to Now also a number of Indigenous authors.
• Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia is somewhere on my TBR pile.
• We also have a number of children's picture books at work that I can peruse.

The hard part will be having enough time to review three or four of these to coincide with ILW. Nothing like a challenge, I say.

What will you be reading for Indigenous Literature Week?