Bundanon

Lucy Neave is the author of the novels Believe in Me (UQP, 2021) which was Highly Commended for the Christina Stead Prize in 2022, and Who We Were, (Text Publishing, 2013), which was shortlisted for the ACT Book of the Year Award in 2014.

She has published in Best Australian Stories 2009 & 2014, and in Australian and American literary journals, including Overland and Antipodes. Her scholarly essays are on crisis in contemporary literature and fiction writing process. The recipient of two Australia Council for the Arts grants, a 2018 Griffith Review novella prize and a former Fulbright scholar, Lucy is Associate Professor in Creative Writing and English at the ANU. 

In Residence at Bundanon

While at Bundanon, Lucy will be working on a novel entitled True Animal War Music which is about the experience of war as ‘backdrop’–insidious and ever-present–to undeniable reality in the lives of three characters. Set between the 1890s and the late twenty-first century, it is told in part from the perspective of a ghost who cannot rest on account of his participation in the British conquest of Sudan in 1899. In all three connected narratives, Neave evokes the effects of technology and war on parent-child relationships. The three intertwined narratives include the story of an Australian woman whose partner, an Israeli national, suffers PTSD in the lead-up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, and a narrative about the recruitment of an orchestral musician to a rebel group in a future world where people are surveilled and controlled by ‘wartech’. In the main story, the reader experiences the ghost’s formative trauma and his abrupt deployment to Sudan. All three narratives are infused with dark humour, animated by music, and evoke their characters’ problematic but undeniable humanity.