The Rot

‘Rageful, desireful, artful, sorrowful, hauntful. A blaze of a book.’ Michelle de Kretser

‘Biting, anguished and revelatory.’ Melissa Lucashenko

‘Evelyn Araluen’s poetry and prose is created with a passionate intensity, razor-sharp intellect, beauty and compassion as she turns her mind to the broad sweep of history and a dynamic engagement with the spirit of our times.’ Alexis Wright

‘The Rot has the scale, intensity, linguistic versatility and critical acuity to become a turning point, a marker in the commitment to repair the damage.’ John Kinsella

‘Blistering, brilliant, lacerating, wry, elegiac, The Rot is a hymn to girlhood, to resistance, to solidarity. Araluen is a masterful stylist, braiding air-fryer abjectioncore with bathtub meditations on the machinery of colonialism - and the whiplash and fury of witnessing and protesting genocide in the digital age. For all its allusions to mould and decay, The Rot is exhilarating in its defiance and staunchness.’ Jennifer Down

‘Evelyn Araluen returns with a book of unblinking ferocity and corrosive beauty. She drapes her language across fractured hopes, decaying romances, forcing the reader into complicity with despair. But don’t come here looking for epiphany, resolution or redemption. Araluen dismantles the idea that poetry should soothe or elevate, welding craft as rupture. The Rot is not to be read - it is to be reckoned with.’ Sara M Saleh

Evelyn Araluen is a Goorie and Koori poet, editor and researcher. Born and raised on Dharug Country and in the broader Western Sydney Black community, she now lives on Wurundjeri Country where she works as a lecturer at the Wilin Centre for Indigenous Arts and Cultural Development, as a co-editor of Overland Literary Journal and Chairperson for the Board of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies. Her debut poetry collection, Dropbear, won the 2022 Stella Prize and the Australian Book Industry Award’s 2022 Small Publisher’s Adult Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the premier’s awards of New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria. Her work has also received the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize and a Melbourne Prize Career Development Award.