Book recommendations from SJ Norman!

SJ Norman is an artist, writer and curator. Their career has so far spanned seventeen years and has embraced a diversity of disciplines, including solo and ensemble performance, installation, sculpture, text, video and sound. Their work has been commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney, Performance Space New York, Venice International Performance Art Week, and the National Gallery of Australia, to name a few. They are the recipient of numerous awards for contemporary art, including a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship and an Australia Council Fellowship. Their writing has won or placed in numerous prizes, including the Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award, the Peter Blazey Award, the Judith Wright Prize and the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. In 2019, they established Knowledge of Wounds, a global gathering of queer First Nations artists, which they co-curate with Joseph M Pierce. They are currently based between Sydney and New York. Their latest book is a short fiction collection called Permafrost.

Today, SJ Norman is on the blog to share with us their favourite books from First Nations authors. Read on!

SJ Norman on Permafrost

Permafrost is a collection of short stories that explores the shifting spaces of desire, loss and longing. Inverting and queering the gothic and romantic traditions, each story represents a different take on the concept of a haunting or the haunted. Though it ranges across themes and locations – from small-town Australia to Hokkaido to rural England – Permafrost is united by the power of the narratorial voice, with its auto-fictional resonances, dark wit and swagger.

Here’s my essential First Nations reading list. It’s spread across genres and forms, and includes Indigenous authors from Australia, Turtle Island and Africa. Their nationhood is listed alongside their names.

how to make a basket by Jazz Money (Wiradjuri)

Johnny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead (Oji-Cree, Peguis Nation)

Talking up to the White Woman by Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Goenpul)

Dear Senthuran by Akwaeke Emezi (Igbo)

Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq (Inuit)

We Left Them Nothing by Demian DinéYhazi (Diné)

Throat by Ellen van Neerven (Mununjali)

A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree)

Nature Poem by Tommy Pico (Kumeyaay)

Black and Blue by Veronica Gorrie (Gunai/Kurnai)

Flock: First Nations Stories Then and Now edited by Ellen van Neerven

Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers by Jake Skeets (Diné)

Disintegrate/Dissociate by Arielle Twist (Cree)

Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen (Bundjalung)

Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction edited by Joshua Whitehead.

Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature edited by Qwo-Li Driskill, Daniel Heath Justice, Deborah Miranda and Lisa Tatonetti

Song of the Crocodile by Nardi Simpson (Yuwaalaraay)

Post Me to the Prime Minister by Romaine Moreton (Bundjalung, Goenpul Yagera)

Journey into Dreamtime by Munya Andrews (Bardi)

The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades by Munya Andrews (Bardi)

Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta (Apalech Clan)

There, There by Tommy Orange (Cheyenne, Arapaho)

As We Have Always Done by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Mississauga Nishnaabeg)

Permafrost

by SJ Norman

Visual and performance artist, and winner of the inaugural Kill Your Darlings Manuscript Award, SJ Norman turns their hand to fiction with spectacular results.

This brilliant collection of short fiction explores the shifting spaces of desire, loss and longing. Inverting and queering the gothic and romantic traditions, each story represents a different take on the concept of a haunting or the haunted. Though it ranges across themes and locations - from small-town Australia to Hokkaido to rural England - Permafrost is united by the power of the narratorial voice, with its auto-fictional resonances, dark wit and swagger...

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