Longlisted for the 2022 Stella Prize
Homecoming – Elfie Shiosaki
Poetry · Magabala Books
About the book
Homecoming pieces together fragments of stories about four generations of Noongar women and explores how they navigated the changing landscapes of colonisation, protectionism, and assimilation to hold their families together.
This seminal collection of poetry, prose and historical colonial archives, tells First Nations truths of unending love for children—those that were present, those taken, those hidden and those that ultimately stood in the light.
Homecoming speaks to the intergenerational dialogue about Country, kin and culture. This elegant and extraordinary form of restorative story work amplifies Aboriginal women’s voices, and enables four generations of women to speak for themselves. This sublime debut highlights the tenacity of family as well as First Nation’s agency to resist, survive and renew.
Elfie Shiosaki has restored humanity and power to her family in this beautifully articulated collection and has given voice to those silenced by our brutal past.
“Shiosaki moves beyond authorship, occupying, instead, the liminal space of daughter, caretaker, and choirmaster to a chorus of voices.”
– 2022 Stella Prize Judges
About the author
Elfie Shiosaki
Elfie Shiosaki is a Noongar and Yawuru writer. She is a Lecturer in Indigenous Rights at the School of Indigenous Studies at the University of Western Australia. She was the Editor of Indigenous Writing at Westerly from 2017 to 2021.
Further Reading
Reviews
“Homecoming calls a younger generation to gather all we can before it is lost, and reminds white readers that the real cost of this land they walk on is the lives that were torn apart. Sometimes “sorry” just isn’t enough.” – Carissa Lee, The Saturday Paper
“The poems are ‘fragments of many stars’ in her grandmothers’ constellations.” – Jeanine Leane, Australian Book Review
“Homecoming speaks to the intergenerational dialogue about Country, kin and culture.” – Australian Arts Review
Links
Listen to Elfie Shiosaki discuss Homecoming on ABC Radio’s Saturday Breakfast with Roanna Edwards
Watch Elfie Shiosaki in conversation at Ubud Writers Festival
Read ‘KIN Editorial’ by Elfie Shiosaki in Cordite Poetry Review
Judges’ report
Homecoming is both a genre-defying book, and a deeply respectful ode to the persistence of Noongar people in the face of colonisation and its afterlives. Elfie Shiosaki writes with a steady – and often invisible – hand, amplifying the voices of people whose words have been buried for too long.
Shiosaki has produced a work of careful excavation. With an extraordinarily light touch on the page, Shiosaki moves beyond authorship, occupying, instead, the liminal space of daughter, caretaker, and choirmaster to a chorus of voices.
Shiosaki has delivered a work of poetic and narrative genius and can be read either as an ensemble of poems or as a single piece that moves seamlessly between the elegiac and the joyful. Homecoming is a gift to the nation, one that works its magic with a quiet grace and an unstinting clarity.
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