We Are Here

Description

How can you feel anchored when you have no place to call your own? Australia has a large shadow population of people who experience homelessness - whether couch-surfing, staying in a refuge, boarding house or caravan park, or sleeping rough. Too often they are dismissed or blamed. They are spoken for, and about, but rarely get to speak for themselves. Edited by former BIG ISSUE deputy editor Meg Mundell, WE ARE HERE is a vibrant and moving collection of true stories showcasing the creative talents of people who have known homelessness. From cold city doorways to lonely bush camps, from a borrowed couch to a discreetly parked car, from dodgy boarding houses to the humid hell of Manus Island, these powerful, defiant and illuminating stories will make every reader question their place in the world. And the kind of place they want the world to be. All profits from the sale of this book will be donated to charities that work with people experiencing homelessness. The writers and visual artists featured in WE ARE HERE have been paid for their contributions.

Meg Mundell is a Melbourne-based novelist, journalist and academic. She is the editor of the forthcoming anthology We Are Here: Stories of Home, Place and Belonging (Affirm Press, October 2019), a collection of true stories by people who have experienced homelessness, and her second novel, The Trespassers (UQP), is out in August 2019. Meg's first novel, Black Glass (2011), was shortlisted for two Aurealis Awards, the Barbara Jefferis Award, the Norma K. Hemming Award, and the CAL-Scribe Fiction Prize, and her fiction, essays and journalism have been published in Best Australian Stories, Meanjin, The Age, The Monthly, The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian Financial Review, Cordite Poetry Review, Overland, Australian Book Review and elsewhere. Born and raised in Aotearoa, New Zealand, Meg has worked in homelessness policy and is a former deputy editor of The Big Issue Australia.