Longlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize
Mykaela Saunders – Always Will Be
Fiction · University Queensland Press
About the Book
In this stunningly inventive and thought-provoking collection, Mykaela Saunders poses the question: what might country, community and culture look like in the Tweed if Gooris reasserted their sovereignty?
Each of the stories in Always Will Be is set in its own future version of the Tweed. In one, a group of girls plot their escape from a home they have no memory of entering. In another, two men make a final visit to the country they love as they contemplate a new life in a faraway place. Saunders imagines different scenarios for how the local Goori community might reassert sovereignty – reclaiming country, exerting full self-determination, or incorporating non-Indigenous people into the social fabric – while practising creative, ancestrally approved ways of living with changing climates.
Epic in scope, and with a diverse cast of characters, Always Will Be is the ground-breaking winner of the 2022 David Unaipon Award. This is a forward-thinking collection that refuses cynicism and despair, and instead offers entertaining stories that celebrate Goori ways of being, knowing, doing – and becoming.
Saunders has created a collection of stories that mirrors its characters; thrumming with life.
– 2025 Stella Prize Judges
About the Author
Mykaela Saunders
Dr Mykaela Saunders is an award-winning Koori/Goori and Lebanese writer and editor. This All Come Back Now won the Aurealis Award and Always Will Be won the David Unaipon Award. She is a postdoctoral research fellow at Macquarie University. Of Dharug descent, Mykaela belongs to the Tweed Goori community.
Further Reading
Reviews
“At the heart of these experiments is a notion once penned by Octavia Butler: ‘The only lasting truth is change.” Jumaana Abdu, Kill Your Darlings
“Ambitious and thought-provoking in scope, Always Will Be features a range of stories that tackle the idea of future sovereignty in the Tweed through various speculative fiction approaches.” Elaine Chennatt, Aniko Press
“By putting the focus on Indigenous life and living, Saunders shatters settler-colonial fabrications that relegate Indigenous peoples to the margins of their own narratives.” Sulagna Basu, Meanjin
Links
Listen to Mykaela Saunders on ABC RN’s The Book Show
Mykaela Saunders on First Nations Classics, ‘Plains of Promise’ and ‘Always Will Be’ – NITV Radio
Judges’ Report
The Colonial mindset is certainly characterised by its deprivations, by the inability of western settlers in particular to imagine truly radical and better futures for themselves, let alone anyone else. Mykaela Saunders is not here to prompt Damascene conversions, however. Always Will Be is a triumphant work of blackfella speculative fiction that splinters into 16 imagined futures where Goori people in and around the Tweed Coast survive and flourish, even as they face the climate and country calamities sponsored by capitalism, colonialism and cowardice. These futures are vivid and alive. Saunders is a Dharug descendant who was raised in the knowledge and ways of Bundjalung culture. Hers is an expansive imagination that draws from the strength of First Nations relations to propel her prose beyond expectation. She executes these stories with distinction and delivers whole worlds that assert resistance, care and sovereignty. In doing so, Saunders has created a collection of stories that mirrors its characters; thrumming with life.
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