Ordinary Matter

Inspired by the twenty times women have won Nobel Prizes for science, this short-story collection from award-winning author Laura Elvery is a dazzling, thought-provoking follow-up to Trick of the Light.

In 1895 Alfred Nobel rewrote his will and left his fortune made in dynamite and munitions to generations of thinkers. Since 1901 women have been honoured with Nobel Prizes for their scientific research twenty times, including Marie Curie twice.

Spanning more than a century and ranging across the world, this inventive story collection is inspired by these women whose work has altered history and saved millions of lives. From a transformative visit to the Grand Canyon to a baby washing up on a Queensland beach, a climate protest during a Paris heatwave to Stockholm on the eve of the 1977 Nobel Prize ceremony, these stories interrogate the nature of inspiration and discovery, motherhood and sacrifice, illness and legacy. Sometimes the extraordinary pivots on the ordinary.

About the Author

Laura Elvery is a writer from Brisbane. Her work has been published in The Big Issue Fiction Edition, Review of Australian Fiction, Kill Your Darlings and Griffith Review.

She has won the Josephine Ulrick Prize for Literature and the Margaret River Short Story Competition, and was awarded a Griffith Review Queensland Writing Fellowship.

She has been shortlisted for the Overland NUW Fair Australia, Neilma Sidney and Victoria University prizes. In 2016, Laura was shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript.