Smoke Encrypted Whispers

Now included in UQP's First Nations Classics series with an introduction from Tony Birch, Smoke Encrypted Whispers is a stunning collection of exhilarating poems, urban songlines and ancestral ties that have become the hallmarks of this poet.

Reading this book is, as Tony Birch points out, 'like witnessing Bruce Springsteen meet the Dreamtime'.

Smoke Encrypted Whispers showcases Samuel Wagan Watson's imaginative brilliance and exceptional poetic skills. In this book, which also includes work from three previous collections, his poems pulse with the language and images of a mangrove-lined river city, the beckoning highway, the just-glimpsed muse, the tug of childhood and restless ancestors. Wagan Watson's poetry is the work of an artist who speaks to a sense of our common humanity, and to a communal attachment to place.

About the Author

Hailing from the honourable ancestors of the Birra-Gubba, Mununjali, Germanic and Gaelic peoples, Samuel Wagan Watson grew up in a family of accomplished authors, political players, entrepreneurs, academics, artists and raconteurs. His collection of poetry Of Muse, Meandering and Midnight won the 1999 David Unaipon Award for unpublished Indigenous writers. Since then he has written Hotel Bone (2001); Itinerant Blues (2002); Smoke Encrypted Whispers (2004), which won the 2005 New South Wales Premier's Book of the Year and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and the New South Wales Premier's Book of the Year; The Curse Words (2011); and Love Poems and Death Threats (2014), which won the 2016 Scanlon Award for Indigenous Poetry and was shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. His work has been translated into seven languages, inspired various musical compositions, and has been the subject of film and television productions and visual art projects. In 2018 Samuel was awarded the Patrick White Literary Award.