Sometimes I think it's possible to live with anything. That we're wired to survive-survive-survive, to grip onto the gnarliest thread until life is pried from our bones. Other times I think, it's not possible to live at all. Not at all.
Blueberries could be described as a collection of essays, the closest term available for a book that resists classification: a blend of personal essay, polemic, prose poetry, true-crime journalism and confession that considers a fragmented life, reflecting on what it means to be a woman, a body, an artist. It is both a memoir and an interrogation of memoir. It is a new horizon in storytelling.
In crystalline prose, Savage explores the essential questions of the examined life: what is it to desire? What is it to accommodate oneself to the world? And at what cost?
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.
'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
'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
'In form and in content, Blueberries is exquisite.' Stella Prize Judges' Report
