Blak & Bright (the first ever Victorian Indigenous Literary Festival!) will take place over three days in Melbourne, and feature more than 60 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander novelists, storytellers, poets, songwriters, playwrights, academics, comedians, raconteurs and rabble-rousers. The festival organisers are currently looking to hear your personal reflections on Indigenous writing. They want to know why you read blak, or why you write blak. Find out more here.

If you haven’t read many books by Indigenous authors up to this point, then here’s a brief guide to help you dip your toes in. The following is just a small sample of all that this exciting and rich terrain of literature has to offer.

(As an added bonus, several of these authors will be appearing at Blak & Bright. Look out for the program announcement on Tuesday 19 January, 2016.)

Contemporary fiction

• Melissa Lukeshenko’s fifth novel, Mullumbimy, is a darkly funny novel of romantic love and cultural warfare, that takes a clear-eyed look at native title disputes. Lukeshenko’s punchy, sharp prose incorporates Bundjalung language with English, and at the heart of this story lies questions of belonging, to each other and to place.
• Tiddas follows a year in the lives of five female friends, all in their mid-40s and struggling with various aspects of their careers and relationships. The author, Anita Heiss, has written a range of different books, from ‘koori chick lit’ to memoir, so if you enjoy this one there’s plenty more to dicover.
• Tony Birch frequently writes stories of troubled teenage boys, and the challenges they face in moving beyond their situation. His most recent novel, Ghost River, is centred on the Yarra river and an unlikely friendship that forms around it, while his Miles Franklin-shortlisted novel, Blood, takes readers down the back roads of Australia with a brother and sister on the run.

Coming-of-age stories

• Set in 2008, the year of Kevin Rudd’s ‘Sorry’, Grace Beside Me is a quirky story of home and family. Narrator Fuzzy Mac describes her life with her grandparents in the small town of Laurie with warmth and a charmingly original voice.
• Jared Thomas has a new book slated for release in 2016 so now is the perfect time to read his earlier YA novel, Calypso Summer. Calypso is a young Nukunu man, fresh out of high school and in Rastafarian guise, who is pressured into learning more about his own Indigenous culture due to a new job.
• Playwright Jane Harrison’s debut novel was a hit with our staff this year. With a double narrative that flits back and forth between the 60s and 80s, Becoming Kirrali Lewis is fast-paced, heartfelt and assured. (Harrison is also the Festival Director of Blak & Bright!)
• Tara Jane Winch’s Swallow the Air is about to celebrate its tenth anniversary since publication. It’s a tender story about a young girl growing up on the fringes of Wollongong, as she comes to term with loss.

Fantasy and dystopias

• The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf is the first book in Ambelin Kwaymullina’s thrilling YA dystopian trilogy. The story opens with 16-year-old Ashala being escorted down a long hallway inside a Detention Centre.
• Set far in the future, Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book takes place in an environment fundamentally altered by climate change, and in which Aboriginal people are still living under the Intervention in the north. With powerfully imaginative, energetic prose, Wright draws from myths, legends and fairytales, in her telling of Oblivia’s story.
• Ellen van Neerven’s debut short story collection, Heat and Light, was one of the six books shortlisted for our Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction this year. She’s an impressive writer, and in one long story, offers a compelling futuristic imagining of a people whose existence is under threat.

Memoir

• Sally Morgan’s 1987 memoir My Place is still read and recommended today, and with good reason. It’s a necessary, beautifully-told story.
• Kate Howarth’s Settling Day is the long-awaited follow-up to her earlier memoir, Ten Hail Marys, which chronicled her volatile upbringing and the fight to save her son from the forced adoption practices of the time.
• Mother and daughter Lesley Williams and Tammy Williams have teamed to write Not Just Black and White, an inspirational story about family and following your dreams despite the odds.

Historical fiction

• Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart, was a joint winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2000. This complex novel is a blend of stream of consciousness, factual information, history and memories.
• Scott was then awarded this prestigious literary prize a second time in 2011, for That Deadman Dance, which explores the early contact between the Aboriginal Noongar people and the first European settlers.
• In Mazin Grace, Dylan Coleman fictionalises her mother’s childhood at the Koonibba Lutheran Mission in South Australia in the 1940s and 50s.

Non-fiction

• In Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?, Bruce Pascoe argues against the ‘hunter, gatherer’ label that so many of us associate with the history of Aboriginal people. He draws on the work of Bill Gammage, R Gerritsen and others, as well as his own research.
• The Intervention: An Anthology is an extraordinary document. Award-winning writers Rosie Scott and Dr Anita Heiss have gathered together the work of twenty of Australian’s finest writers (both Indigenous and non-Indigenous) with powerful statements from Northern Territory Elders to bring a new dimension and urgency to an issue that has remained largely outside the public radar.
• Old Man’s Story: The Last Thoughts of Kakadu Elder Bill Neidjie contains the last thoughts of the late Kakadu elder and activist, Bill Neidjie. Our reviewer writes: ‘The conversations in this book open up complex ideas about places in our recent history which are easy to overlook. The act of telling these (hi)stories is a way of confirming our extraordinary ecological present, but also of understanding each other.’

Poetry

• Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha poet Ali Cobby Eckermann is at the forefront of Australian Indigenous poetry, and her poetry collection, Inside My Mother, is both political and personal. Both Jennifer Maiden and Robert Adamson selected this collection as one of their favourite books of the year.
• Samuel Wagan Watson is an award-winning Indigenous poet and is most recent collection of poems is Love Poems and Death Threats, demonstrates why he’s one of the nation’s most exciting poets.
• In Sister Heart, Sally Morgan writes from the perspective of a young Aboriginal girl who’s taken from the north of Australia and sent to an institution in the distant south. It’s a heartbreaking story told beautifully.

Great reads for the kids

• Bronwyn Bancroft’s Why I Love Australia is a magnificent celebration of country, while for We All Sleep, Sally Morgan and Ezekiel Kwaymullina take readers on a journey through a single day in lyrical language and sumptuous colour.
• For slightly older readers 5+, Harry’s Secret is the story of a young boy who’s afraid to share his love of art with his friends.
• Bruce Pascoe’s Sea Horse is an adventure story about a sunken ship for 8+, with beautiful descriptions of the Australian coastline.