Following the success of the 2019 Liminal Fiction Prize and our subsequent anthology, Collisions, I founded the Liminal & Pantera Press Nonfiction Prize, for First Nations writers and writers of colour. We brought together a beautiful collection of twenty essays from the prize’s longlist: Against Disappearance: Essays on Memory.

In this collection of new essays, First Nations writers and writers of colour bend and shift boundaries, query the past and envision new futures. They ask: How do we write or hold our former selves, our ancestries? How does where we come from connect to where we are headed? How do we tell the stories of those who have been diminished or ignored in the writing of history? How do we do justice to the lives they lived, or to the people they were?

From the intricacies of trans becoming, to violences inflicted on stateless peoples, to complex inheritances and the intertwining of tradition, politics and place, this prescient collection challenges singular narratives about the past, offering testimony and prophecy alike.

Featuring essays by André Dao, Barry Corr, Brandon K. Liew, Elizabeth Flux, Frankey Chung-Kok-Lun, grace ugamay dulawan, Hannah Wu, Hasib Hourani, Hassan Abul, Jon Tjhia, Kasumi Bocrzyk, Lucia Tường Vy Nguyễn, Lou Garcia-Dolnik, Lur Alghurabi, Mykaela Saunders, Ouyang Yu, Ruby-Rose Pivet-Marsh, Ryan Gustafsson, Suneeta Peres da Costa and Veronica Gorrie.

Reviews

With originality and uncompromising individuality, each essay broadens the definition of what it means to be a writer in so-called Australia, showing what is possible for the creative non-fiction genre.
— Kill Your Darlings

This anthology could be a stone in a creek – an interruption to the flow of discourse, or just a staunch presence that is part of both the river and its redirection.
— The Saturday Paper

Buy a copy for yourself, buy a copy for your friends, and prepare to be overwhelmed.
— The Guardian, ‘Best Australia Books out in September’

Dear reader, in recommending books to you, know that I only have 300 words to say whatever it is I wish to, and that part of me thinks maybe today I should just write the following three words 100 times: Read this book.
—ABC News

New Books by Australian Authors to Look Out For
— Against Disappearance featured in T Magazine

These writers are exploring the limits of prose, crashing up against them to delineate the edges, like a bat using echolocation in a cave. What glimpses there are beyond these limits thrill with possibility.
—James Whitmore

Awarded ‘Book of the Year’ 2023 Small Press Network

“Against Disappearance: Essays on Memory (Pantera Press) is exactly the kind of invigorating non-fiction that small, risk-taking publications like Liminal, excel at. It is a physically beautiful collection, presented with an understated sophistication that reflects those same qualities in the works. Edited by Leah Jing McIntosh and Adolfo Aranjuez, this collection brings together writers from across a variety of disciplines and thought, that reveals its themes of identity, love, family, home in fragments, traversing intellect and object, a tapestry that is felt as much as read. It is exceptional to read, and exciting to imagine a future of Australian publishing inspired by works such as this one.” Judges’ Report