A spotlight on Highway Bodies by Alison Evans
Highway Bodies is one of the six books shortlisted for this year’s Readings Young Adult Book Prize.
A zombie spills out, musta bin leanin on the door. She screams, jumps forward, an the zombie’s reachin for us, fingernails cracked an bloody. It opens its mouth but no noise comes out. It used to be an old person, it’s wearin a dressin-gown; green, lacy pattern on the sleeves an collar.
– Alison Evans, Highway Bodies
Here’s what the judges said…
‘ Highway Bodies follows three groups of resilient teens who wake one morning to find the world they know is torn apart. A virus is ravaging Melbourne, twisting the population into feral, violent zombies in its wake, and as our heroes make their way across this new post-apocalyptic landscape, they are thrown together in a desperate struggle to survive.
Highway Bodies is a tense and visceral zombie thriller set against the backdrop of urban and rural Australia; you can sense the scrape of a bloody shovel on a cracked highway road, the cawing magpies and the crunch of dried gum leaves underfoot. Evans’ characters are fully realised – they are intelligent, resourceful, flawed and vulnerable. Featuring a range of queer and gender-non-conforming protagonists, each with their own distinct voice, Highway Bodies is a brilliant contribution to LGBTQIA+ representation in Australian YA literature. This is a thrilling, gory and gutsy zombie-slasher novel with a resonant message of finding family amid chaos and of surviving in solidarity.’
– Georgia Phelan, chair of the 2019
Meet the author…
Alison Evans’ first YA book, Ida, was published in 2017 (Echo Publishing). Ida won the People’s Choice Award in the Victorian Premier’s Awards 2018, was shortlisted in the 2017 Aurealis Awards, and longlisted for a 2018 Gold Inky Award. Alison is the co-editor of the zine Concrete Queers, which they started with Katherine Back in 2015. So far, the zine has featured over sixty queer artists. Alison has been an artist at Melbourne Writers Festival, Emerging Writers Festival, National Young Writers Festival, Reading Matters, and Feminist Writers Festival, and has done many library and bookshop events.
