Longlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize
Dylin Hardcastle – Language of Limbs
Fiction · Pan Macmillan Australia
About the Book
The first love of a teenage girl is a powerful thing, particularly when the object of that desire is her best friend, also a girl. It’s the kind of power that could implode a family, a friendship, a life. On a quiet summer night in Newcastle, 1972, a choice must be made: to act upon these desires, or suppress them? To live an openly queer life, or to try desperately not to?
Over the following three decades, two lives almost intersect in pivotal moments, the distance between them at times drawing so thin they nearly collide. Against the backdrop of an era including Australia’s first Mardi Gras and the AIDS pandemic, we see these two lives ebb and flow, with joy and grief and loss and desire, until at last they come together in the most beautiful and surprising of ways.
A Language of Limbs is about love and how it’s policed, friendship and how it transcends, and hilarity in the face of heartbreak. An unashamed celebration of queer life in all its vibrancy and colour, this story finds the humanity in all of us, and demands we claim our futures for ourselves.
This novel is an exquisite thing, burning with desire.
– 2025 Stella Prize Judges
About the Author
Dylin Hardcastle
Dylin Hardcastle is an author, artist and screenwriter. They are the author of three critically acclaimed books. Their first adult novel, Below Deck, was published in ten territories. Dylin is the co-creator, co-writer and co-director of the TV show Cloudy River. In 2018, they were a Provost’s Scholar and a research assistant in World Literature at the University of Oxford. Dylin is currently completing their PhD in Creative Writing. Dylin has travelled to Antarctica, South America and Europe for artist residencies, and has exhibited their paintings widely across Australia and the UK. A Language of Limbs has been optioned and is in development with Curio (Sony Pictures).
Further Reading
Reviews
“The coexistence of joy and horror is continually touched upon in pivotal moments, as Hardcastle masterfully depicts the fluid nature of grief and the beauty that can accompany it.” Sarah Robbins, The AU Review
“The prose is textured, viscous almost, an ooze of sweet honey shot through with golden light. It is the literary equivalent of a day abed with a new lover, every moment gilded and momentous.” Yves Rees, Australian Book Review
Links
Listen to Dylin Hardcastle talk on the Queer Review Mirror podcast.
Judges’ Report
Much has been made of the ways beauty can co-exist with violence and suffering, and Dylin Hardcastle reveals such mysteries here with a superb eye and ear for the language of both. A Language of Limbs is striated with a queer instinct for togetherness and community even as those very things are threatened from the outside. This is a love story that braids two lives, or two limbs, over many decades and produces an effect which might at first be confused as flattening but which announces itself as a subtle and powerful device as the book unfolds. The AIDS crisis and queer resistance happened in many ways to many tens of thousands of different people but there were, are, common threads that run between all. Hardcastle takes this understanding as the core of their work and breathes life into it. This novel is an exquisite thing, burning with desire.
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