Shortlisted for the 2022 Stella Prize

Anwen Crawford – No Document

Nonfiction · Giramondo

About the Book



No Document 
is an elegy for a friendship and artistic partnership cut short by death. The memory of this collaboration becomes a model for how we might relate to others in sympathy, solidarity and rebellion. At once intimate and expansive, Anwen Crawford’s book-length essay explores loss in many forms: disappeared artworks, effaced histories, abandoned futures. Written out of the turmoil of grief and the imperfection of memory, her perspective embraces histories of protest and revolution, art-making and cinema, border policing, and especially our relationships with animals. No Document shows how love, kinship and resistance echo through time.

Anwen Crawford is best known for her writing as a critic, and here she draws also on her background in poetry, and as a zine-maker and visual artist, to develop a new way of writing about the past, using a symphonic method of composition and collage. No Document is an urgent work of non-fiction that reimagines the boundaries that divide us – as people, nations and species – and asks how we can create forms of solidarity that endure.

No Document is a longform poetic essay that considers the ways we might use an experience of grief to continue living, creating, and reimagining the world we live in with greater compassion and honour.

About the Author


Anwen Crawford

Judges’ Report


Further Reading


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