Promotional Information

A stimulating combination of memoir, essay, poetry, confession and critique, Blueberries is a powerful and revealing collection from a rising star in Australian creative non-fiction.

About the Author

Ellena Savage is an author and academic. Her work has been publishing widely in anthologies and literary journals including, recently, the Paris Review Daily, Sydney Review of Books, Choice Words and Lifted Brow, which she is a former editor of. Ellena is the recipient of several grants and prizes, including the 2019–21 Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship. She lives in Athens, Greece. Blueberries is her first collection.

Reviews

‘Her voice [is] reassuringly droll, critical and warmly intimate…[Savage] has a poetic way of reminding us that crucial learning comes only with age—that time is finite.’
*Saturday Paper*

'Delving into troubling territory, Savage brings a fierce intellect, sharp wit and a handful of uncomfortable truths. To read her is to be simultaneously thrilled and uneasy.'
*Jessie Cole, author of Staying*

'Savage navigates delicate and difficult terrain with wit, ruthless scrutiny and painfully sharp analysis…If Yellow City is any indication, Blueberries will be one of the most exciting debuts of the new year.’
*Overland*

'Once I started reading Blueberries, I found it almost impossible to put down. It’s fascinating to watch Ellena Savage’s mind at work in this book—her essays unfurl, expand, and dance in unexpected and satisfying ways. This is a masterful, fearless book in which strength and vulnerability collide.'
*Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I’m Someone Else*

‘A breathtaking interrogation of the self in the world; the self within structures of power and oppression...Blueberries is exciting and distinctive.’
*Books+Publishing (starred review)*

'Ellena Savage is a rare kind of true intellectual, a voice that rises above the cacophony with remarkable insight. In Blueberries, she cuts fearless swathes through the ways that we write and think and live now and leaves us far better for it: the book is unsettling, life-affirming and essential.’
*Jean Edelstein, author of This Isn't Really About You*

‘[Savage is] either a genius, or a witch, or my dream coupling of the two.’
*Rita Bullwinkel, author of Belly Up*

'Blueberries feels like laying down on the train tracks and looking up at the sky—a reverie, shot through by a feeling of acceleration, of something vast coming at you. Ellena Savage's essays are heartstopping epics of self-inquiry and world-inquiry.’
*Maria Tumarkin*

‘Ellena Savage, in Blueberries, confronts the past convulsively, compulsively. In dialogic language and form, the author, facing memory's traumas and perplexities, and also its delights, is constantly aware that it's all about the translation of experience from the private to the public realm. In extremis, which is where Savage shines especially, it's as if she saying to the "repressed": go ahead and return; make my day.'
*David Lazar, Professor of Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago*

‘Reading Ellena Savage’s Blueberries engaged me completely. Savage’s sparkling writing is bold, witty, insightful, fearless and funny. It emerges from an astute mind at odds with itself, with culture and society. Savage wrestles and plays with received ideas of all kinds, and with what has and hasn’t shaped her. Savage’s fierce essays and stories are true to a lived life, and fascinating and irresistible.’
*Lynne Tillman*

‘Ellena Savage is savagely smart and talented.’
*Rachel Kushner*

‘Wrestling with the intricacies of memory, identity, class and trauma, [Blueberries] sees Savage contemplate her past with unflinching clarity…Take it to your next book club.'
*Elle Australia*

‘Ellena Savage has produced a collection that defies categorisation but is fervently experiential, candid and original.'
*Readings Monthly*

‘For fans of Maria Tumarkin, Kathy Acker and Maggie Nelson, Blueberries marks Savage as an experimental writer and essayist to watch.'
*Adelaide Review*

‘Savage’s idealism and eloquence are a much-needed counterbalance to our by-now-threadbare belief that all the hard questions of how to order our world have been answered, that everything unsettling such certainty is a glitch, to be soldered onto the technocratic motherboard and run through the circuits of the polity. Blueberries is an adamant and unruly book. It is also the most exciting work of creative non-fiction to be published in this country since Maria Tumarkin took up the pen.’
*Australian*

‘A masterclass in experimental non-fiction...Savage is fiercely intelligent and manages to inject dry humour into even the most serious topics, creating a delicate balance between dire existentialism and life-affirming joy. By questioning the very nature of memoir itself, Savage breathes new life into the non-fiction form and considers what it means to be alive in today’s uncertain world.’
*Kill Your Darlings*

‘Savage plays with form like a poet, and excavates the roots of her experience with an impressive generosity and fierce intelligence that mirror her mentor, Maria Tumarkin...Fans of Tumarkin and Jia Tolentino should hunt this down… and luxuriate in a recent past where whiplash-inducing international travel was an option.’
*InDaily*

'Blueberries is a sometimes playful, sometimes fierce collection that is, in its own zigzagging way, a coming-of-age story. In every piece, Savage has a biting interrogation of the world and herself...Savage is an excellent critic and a droll one.'
*Age/SMH*

'Defying categorisation, Blueberries is unlike much else in Australian writing at the moment, and heralds Savage as a major new voice in experimental nonfiction.'
*Saturday Paper*

‘Through the shifting subjectivities of Savage’s lyric ‘I’, Blueberries asks piercing questions about power, desire, and violence...Perhaps one of her finest achievements in Blueberries is that, through her version of anti-memoir, Ellena Savage turns the fraught subjectivity of the writerly “I” into a formidable tool for reckoning with the self and the world.’
*Australian Book Review*

'An astonishingly impressive Australian debut for fans of Jia Tolentino and Rebecca Solnit.’
*WellRead*

‘Savage deftly shifts between stylistic devices, narrative voices and time, and the result is breathtaking.’
*Guardian*

'Savage deftly shifts between stylistic devices, narrative voices and time, and the result is breathtaking...The collection, for all its differences in tone, content and structure, comes together beautifully.'
*Guardian*

'Blueberries is quite simply one of the best essay collections of the last twenty years. Read it, and feel that hope for the future we all need right now.'
*Culturefly*

‘Blueberries does not always offer answers to the questions raised in its essays. In this way, however, it manages to be an endlessly curious and intriguing collection of work…[it] is clever, candid, and thoroughly fresh. Just read it.’
*ArtsHub*

‘Savage’s range and intellect demand a slow reading as she canvasses an eclectic array of topics...There’s a restlessness about Savage—a curiosity and an intent to interrogate, particularly with matters regarding sex and class–as she reflects on the power dynamics of what it means to be a (white) woman and a writer.’
*Big Issue*

'Blueberries is a remarkable collection. From the material of our frequently wanton and violent world, Savage has woven together a book that is at once tenacious and wondrously alive.’
*Westerly*

‘Throughout her writing career, Ellena Savage has sought to use the pliable form of the essay to create something entirely new…in Blueberries, her debut collection, she continues this project with astonishing success.’
*Audrey Daybook*

‘Absolutely bloody brilliant.’
*Literary Friction*

'It’s smart, aware and funny while tackling tough issues of sexual abuse, class, memory, privilege and the life of an artist. Each essay blends critical theory and personal reflection, while pushing the boundaries of the form enough to keep each page fresh and challenging.’
*Sarah Mott, Writing NSW*

'Ellena Savage’s debut essay collection, Blueberries, stole my heart ... Blueberries made me a believer: it is the debut of the year.'
*Declan Fry, Sydney Morning Herald*

‘Thrilling for its zest and energy, the cheek and playfulness it brings to the essay form – it was one of those books that made me want to sit down and write.’
*Fiona Wright*

'Savage pushes boundaries in form and content, and she’s ruthless and relentless in pursing her ideas; Blueberries is a work to engage with, not read passively.’
*Readings*

'An intellectually rigorous and energising essay collection that’s both memoir and an interrogation of memoir.’
*Alice Cottrell, Kill Your Darlings*

‘That the self exists in narrative form lies at the centre of Blueberries, as Savage explores the sites of identity—trauma, gender, class, religion, the body—in clear, rhythmic prose…In the last few pages she expunges herself from the narrative, exposing the scaffolding of her project, and leaves us to ponder the untold: the self that is yet to be, “the she of what next: action”.’
*Times Literary Supplement*

'Savage is skilled at imparting language to universal feelings that are difficult to articulate.’
*BOMB Mag*

'In form and in content, Blueberries is exquisite.’
*Stella Prize Judges’ Report*

'A book that almost dares you to try and categorise or assign it a genre...Blueberries is delightfully experiential, challenging readers to abandon their expectations of the English language and treating them to a masterclass in playing with form.’
*Fashion Journal*