We Are Speaking in Code
Exploring themes of family, identity, sexuality and belonging, We Are Speaking in Code is a warm, engaging and thought-provoking collection of essays reflecting the immigrant experience.
Judges' Report
Exploring themes of family, identity, sexuality and belonging, We Are Speaking in Code is a warm, engaging and thought-provoking collection of essays reflecting the immigrant experience. Extremely funny and joyful, this book is also thoughtful and insightful, discussing family heritage and how knowledge can be lost across generations, while also exploring Vavilova’s coming of age. Pushing understandings of subjectivity, Vavilova’s beautiful writing is also wonderfully engaging and intensely personal, drawing the reader in to relate to each emotion while simultaneously keeping them at the edge of every experience.
About the author
Tanya Vavilova’s fiction has won the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund Best Prose and Wollongong Writers Festival Short Story Prize, and has been commended or shortlisted for the Newcastle Short Story Award, Overland’s Fair Australia and Neilma Sidney prizes, and the Seizure Viva La Novella. Her debut collection of short stories, Grub, won the Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award in 2019 and has been released in e-book format and print. We Are Speaking in Code is her first full-length book.
