Scribe acquires David Sornig book

Scribe is thrilled to announce we have acquired world rights in Blue Lake: finding Dudley Flats and the West Melbourne Swamp from talented Melbourne author David Sornig.

Blue Lake is narrative nonfiction of the first order: a social and psychogeographic history of Dudley Flats (Melbourne's Depression-era shanty town) that examines how the 8km-sq zone to the west of Melbourne's CBD, where the shanty town was located, came to be transformed from a fertile wetland into the city's blind spot, and how the uncanny quality of the area persists today. Making extensive use of archival material, Blue Lake focuses on three main characters who lived, at different times, in what Sornig terms ‘The Zone’: Elsie Williams, a Bendigo-born singer of Afro-Caribbean origin; Jack Peacock, the king of Dudley Flats’ tip-scavenging economy; and Lauder Heinrich Rogge, a German hermit who lived for decades with sixty dogs on a stranded ship. By charting their respective rises and falls in fortune, Blue Lake reveals much about the race and class divides of the times in which they lived; their individual stories are also profoundly affecting.

David Sornig is the author of the novel Spiel, (UWAP, 2009). His fiction and non-fiction writing has featured in the Griffith Review, Harvard Review, Adelaide Review and Kill Your Darlings. His essay ‘Jubilee: A Hymn for Elsie Williams on Dudley Flats’ was a finalist for the 2015 Melbourne Prize for Literature Writers Prize, and his subsequent work on Blue Lake was supported by a State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowship.

Blue Lake will be published in September 2018.

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Scribe acquires David Sornig book

Multi-time winner of the Australian Small Publisher of the Year Award