#AtoZ Challenge: K Is For Kwaymullina

Today’s letter in the A to Z Challenge is... K! The author, whom I mentioned briefly in last year’s challenge(Aussie children’s writers) is Ambelin Kwaymullina. 

Ambelin Kwaymullina is an Indigenous Aussie author of fantasy for children and teens. She has done several books for younger readers, and her most recent, Catching Teller Crow, written with her brother Ezekiel, has won or been shortlisted for several awards. We’re still waiting to hear about some of those, including the CBCA shortlist for this year, but it has already won this year’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction. I’m reading it now. The heroine is a ghost. 

However, what she is best known for is her Tribe trilogy, The Interrogation Of Ashala Wolf, The Disappearance Of Ember Crow and The Foretelling Of Georgie Spider. Although it is set in a distant future when the continents have come together again as more or less Pangaia, the story is very much Australian, with an indigenous heroine and references to some nasty events in Australia’s past, including a villain named after a so-called Protector of Aborigines, back in the days when “protection” meant the opposite of protection for its victims. There is even an encounter with the Rainbow Serpent at one stage.

The premise: after the world was almost wiped out by human activity and climate change, the human race has worked hard to get it back to what it should be, and keep it that way. But this is no utopia. Certain humans have developed amazing powers which are not allowed to run around free. So children who have these powers are rounded up and taken to camps to be interrogated and undergo unpleasant experiments. Some of them, including our heroine, Ashala, run away before they can be taken, forming a tribe of their own, rebelling against the authorities. And these young rebels have various psychic powers...

It’s wonderful stuff, which I offered to some of our more thoughtful readers when I was running my school library. They loved it! 

I was lucky enough to meet the author at a science fiction convention, and she helped me get a guest speaker funded by the Stella Awards when I told her about my disadvantaged school in Melbourne’s western suburbs. Ambelin herself lives in Western Australia and, by the way, has a day job and does handcrafting and is involved with the Stellas and still manages to write fabulous fantastic fiction. 

I’ll keep this short because I have done an interview with her on this blog, here. Just be aware that the trilogy was originally planned to be a quartet, so the four books she mentioned in this interview became three.  There is still plenty to read! 

Also, here is a guest post about her writing process.

Her books are easily available on line from the usual booksellers.