Tony Birch
Shadowboxing
Scribe Publications, 2006
Shadowboxing is a collection of ten linked stories in the life of a boy growing up in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy in the 1960s. A beautifully rendered time capsule, it captures a period of decay, turmoil, and change through innocent, unblinking eyes.
Michael’s family, led by his long-suffering mother, live as though under siege, surviving his father’s drinking and rage as well as the forces of ‘urban renewal’. Their neighbourhood is a world of simple pleasures as well as random brutality; of family life and love as well as violence and tragedy. As Michael experiences all this with a combination of wonder and fear, he matures into a sensitive adult who can forgive but never forget.
Shadowboxing is a riveting story of loss and permanence, power and weakness, stoicism and resistance.
About the Author
Tony Birch is the author of three novels: The White Girl, winner of the 2020 NSW Premier’s Award for Indigenous Writing, and shortlisted for the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Prize; Ghost River, winner of the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing; and Blood, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2012. He is also the author of Shadowboxing, and four short story collections: Father’s Day, The Promise, Common Peopleand Dark as Last Night, which won the 2022 NSW Premier’s Literary Award Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction, was shortlisted for the 2022 ABA Booksellers Choice Awards: Nielsen Adult Fiction Book of the Year, and was longlisted for the 2022 Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award. He has published two poetry collections: Broken Teeth and Whisper Songs, which was also longlisted for the 2022 Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award. In 2017 he was awarded the Patrick White Literary Award. Tony Birch is also an activist, historian and essayist.