In this stunningly inventive and thought-provoking collection, 2022 David Unaipon winner Mykaela Saunders poses the question: what might country, community and culture look like if First Nations sovereignty was asserted? Each of the stories in Always Will Be is set in its own future version of the Tweed. In one, a group of girls plot their escape from an institution they have no memory of entering. In another, two men make a final visit to the country they love as they contemplate a new life in a faraway place. Saunders imagines different scenarios for how the local Aboriginal community might exercise their sovereignty – reclaiming country, exerting full self-determination, or incorporating non-Indigenous people into the social fabric – while practising creative, ancestrally approved ways of living with changing climates. Epic in scope, and with a diverse cast of characters, Always Will Be is a forward-thinking collection that refuses cynicism and despair, and instead offers captivating stories that celebrate Goori ways of being, knowing, doing – and becoming.
"'Always Will Be is a unique and exciting collection that writes Aboriginal people, dreams, radical hope and love into the future. In these stories, Mykaela Saunders challenges dominant colonial ideologies and honours the wisdom of ancestors as forward thinkers. Astute, warm and affecting, this is a major contribution to First Nations literature.'"
Natalie Harkin
"'Goori writer Mykaela Saunders breaks new ground in her debut collection of First Nations speculative fiction, Always Will Be. In post-invasion Australia it is time for a reappraisal of the binary between what is real and what is speculative. Mykaela writes First Nations futures as an extension of the possible, not the impossible, and in doing so contests and challenges the assumptions and expectations of settler binaries and deficit discourse that attempt to constrain and restrain what is possible for First Nations peoples and our futures.'"
Jeanine Leane
"'Exceptionally well written … Brave, radical, highly innovative and entertaining.'"
