Byron Writers Festival interviews prize-winning poet Evelyn Araluen who will present her new poetry collection, The Rot, at the 2026 Byron Writers Festival.
Described as a ‘recalcitrant study of the decaying romances, expired hopes and abject injustices of the world,’ it’s heady stuff that exposes the writer’s refusal to avert her gaze from the death of Country, death on Country, and the bloody violence of settler colonies across the globe.
Araluen won the 2022 Stella Prize and the Australian Book Industry Award’s 2022 Small Publisher’s Adult Book of the Year, among numerous other accolades, with her debut poetry collection, Dropbear.
Growing up in Western Sydney Dharug Country, Araluen has a strong connection to Bundjalung country on her father’s side.
‘I didn’t start connecting closer to the land, lore, and language until I started learning with Drew Roberts in Redfern, who was running a Bundjalung language class through the Eora College.
‘It’s a foundational aspect of my identity, and being around Bundjalung mob and to think of my work in that space and in that context is very special.’
Learning the language lured the young writer into poetry.
‘Drew emphasised that learning language wasn’t about fluency, but about what knowledge is growing in yourself in the process. I submitted my very first poem as the TAFE assignment about learning language off Country,’ Araluen said.
‘It allowed me to detach from the laws of the English language and narrowed the way that I could think about communicating, and to explore more experimental and expressive ways of speaking.’
Recent losses of knowledge and wisdom have deeply affected Araluen in an increasingly complex and conflicted world.
‘A matriarch Elder of my own family and my community passed away, and that set off a very specific kind of grief,’ she said.
‘Over the next 18 months, we lost multiple other Elders and knowledge holders including Drew Roberts and it was debilitating.
‘I felt this whole generation of people that had taught me had suddenly disappeared, and I didn’t know how to navigate, and the people I wanted to talk with about the grief of watching a genocide unfold in Gaza suddenly weren’t there.
‘I was writing poetry because… I believe that in times of crisis or poly crisis, all art should bear witness,’ she said. ‘I never want to be in a situation where people claim that we didn’t know, and it’s important that all work produced at this moment makes it clear that we did.’
For Araluen, carrying First Peoples’ practices into the future is essential to establishing a sense of belonging in the present, not only as a connection to the past.
‘Our practices need to be very clear and affirmed, and our refusal to accept those seemingly unavoidable realities of late-stage capitalism. We can imagine a different future for ourselves,’ she said.
Evelyn Araluen will appear at the Byron Writers Festival Saturday and Sunday. For more information, visit byronwritersfestival.com.
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