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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'A groundbreaking new work of non-fiction by one of Australia’s most respected essay writers.
'No Document is an elegy for a friendship cut short prematurely by death. The memory of this friendship becomes a model for how we might relate to others in sympathy, solidarity and rebellion. At once intimate and expansive, Anwen Crawford’s book-length essay explores loss in many forms: disappeared artworks, effaced histories, abandoned futures. From the turmoil of grief and the solace of memory, her perspective embraces histories of protest and revolution, art-making and cinema, border policing, and especially our relationships with animals. No Document shows how love and resistance echo through time.
'Anwen Crawford is best known for her writing as a critic, but here she draws on her background as a zine-maker and visual artist, and her training in poetry, to develop a new way of writing about the past, using a symphonic method of composition and collage. No Document is an urgent, groundbreaking work of non-fiction that reimagines the boundaries that divide us – as people, nations and species – and asks how we can create forms of solidarity that endure.'
Source : publisher's blurb
Notes
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Epigraph: You could say an event in history is over, the way a book is slapped shut when it is done. But where is the market? -Fanny Howe
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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“The Cut Is Tangible” : A Conversation with Anwen Crawford
Mireille Juchau
(interviewer),
2022
single work
interview
— Appears in: Los Angeles Review of Books , 3 August 2022; 'DURING THE SENSORY MONOTONE of Sydney’s lockdown, I failed to finish several contemporary novels that registered no difference between quotidian matters and violence or suffering. Everyone I knew was one click from COVID death tolls as they filtered Zoom to blur domestic chaos. In literature, I could no longer narcotically scroll. Then I read Anwen Crawford’s No Document (2022) and felt the sharp cut that is part of the book’s compositional strategy. Here was an astute awareness of the violence of particular juxtapositions — refugees and nationalism, borders and the state — and an insight into protest cant like “not in our name.” If we’re made and unmade by documents, as Crawford suggests in her sampling of official reports and state directives, then we can hardly ignore how our own words fall on the page. No Document’s use of white space and lineation, its ethically attuned emphasis, is exhilarating. Its shifting tone is wry, bracing, and affecting.' (Introduction)
-
Lens on the Lines That Divide
2021
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 21 August 2021; (p. 18)
— Review of No Document 2021 single work essay -
Anwen Crawford, No Document
2021
single work
review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 3-9 April 2021;
— Review of No Document 2021 single work essay -
Neha Kale Reviews No Document by Anwen Crawford
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , no. 26 2020-2021;
— Review of No Document 2021 single work essay'Anwen Crawford’s No Document, a memorial to the casualties of late capitalism, occupies the space between elegy and witness, language and art.' (Introduction)
-
Anwen Crawford, No Document
2021
single work
review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 3-9 April 2021;
— Review of No Document 2021 single work essay -
Neha Kale Reviews No Document by Anwen Crawford
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , no. 26 2020-2021;
— Review of No Document 2021 single work essay'Anwen Crawford’s No Document, a memorial to the casualties of late capitalism, occupies the space between elegy and witness, language and art.' (Introduction)
-
Lens on the Lines That Divide
2021
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 21 August 2021; (p. 18)
— Review of No Document 2021 single work essay -
“The Cut Is Tangible” : A Conversation with Anwen Crawford
Mireille Juchau
(interviewer),
2022
single work
interview
— Appears in: Los Angeles Review of Books , 3 August 2022; 'DURING THE SENSORY MONOTONE of Sydney’s lockdown, I failed to finish several contemporary novels that registered no difference between quotidian matters and violence or suffering. Everyone I knew was one click from COVID death tolls as they filtered Zoom to blur domestic chaos. In literature, I could no longer narcotically scroll. Then I read Anwen Crawford’s No Document (2022) and felt the sharp cut that is part of the book’s compositional strategy. Here was an astute awareness of the violence of particular juxtapositions — refugees and nationalism, borders and the state — and an insight into protest cant like “not in our name.” If we’re made and unmade by documents, as Crawford suggests in her sampling of official reports and state directives, then we can hardly ignore how our own words fall on the page. No Document’s use of white space and lineation, its ethically attuned emphasis, is exhilarating. Its shifting tone is wry, bracing, and affecting.' (Introduction)
Awards
- 2022 shortlisted Small Press Network Book of the Year Award
- 2022 longlisted APA Book Design Awards — Best Designed Non Fiction Book designed by Jenny Grigg.
- 2022 shortlisted The Stella Prize