In the last decade, trauma narratives have become a defining force in Australian literature. From the Miles Franklin to the Stella Prize, awards juries have consistently honoured books that explore personal and collective wounds.
Stories of abuse, colonisation, institutional violence and loss have become the norm. But as trauma-centred storytelling becomes ubiquitous, questions are being raised: is this trend deepening our empathy or limiting the stories we tell?
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Trauma narratives dominate award shortlists
Many of Australia’s most acclaimed books in recent years centre on trauma. Jennifer Down’s Bodies of Light, winner of the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award, follows a girl subjected to extreme abuse in state care. The judges praised it as ‘an astonishing novel that evades prurience or exploitation’ and noted its ‘ethical precision’ in confronting institutional failure.
Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip, another Miles Franklin winner, explores intergenerational trauma and cycles of family violence in an Aboriginal community. Tara June Winch’s The Yield weaves together the grief of losing language, culture and land through the story of a Wiradjuri woman returning home.
In nonfiction, the trend is just as clear. Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains, written from within Australia’s offshore detention system, swept multiple major awards and was described as ‘profoundly important’. Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do, a journalistic deep-dive into domestic abuse, won the 2020 Stella Prize. In memoir, Amani Haydar’s The Mother Wound, about losing her mother to domestic violence, was widely honoured across state awards.
As Debra Dank’s We Come With This Place collected four prizes at the 2023 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, including Book of the Year, judges noted its portrayal of ‘a path forward from colonial trauma towards mutual respect’.
There is no argument that these works aren’t inherently deserving of their praise and accolades. But the trend has gone largely unexamined, and Is undeniable.
The emotional power (and risk) of trauma narratives
There is no denying the power of these stories. As Sarah Krasnostein’s biography The Trauma Cleaner and Bri Lee’s legal memoir Eggshell Skull reveal, narratives rooted in lived pain can resonate deeply with readers and shape cultural conversations.
They also fill a historical vacuum: for too long, many of these experiences, and especially those of women, Indigenous Australians and migrants, were kept out of the literary mainstream.
But as author Diana Reid has observed, trauma narratives can also follow a predictable structure. A flawed protagonist, a flashback to past harm, a moment of cathartic revelation, the so-called ‘trauma plot’ can become a shortcut for character depth. Reid told the ABC she wanted her novel Seeing Other People to ‘query whether that explanation always applies’.
In a similar vein, The Guardian’s Imogen Dewey noted that once you start looking for this formula, ‘you can’t unsee it’ and questioned whether the market’s hunger for trauma might be shaping what gets published.
Who gets to tell trauma narratives?
Some authors are starting to push back against the expectation that stories from marginalised writers must centre pain. Wiradjuri academic and poet Jeanine Leane has spoken out about what she calls the ‘real trend’ toward deficit narratives, particularly among First Nations writers. ‘There’s an expectation that we’ll produce trauma stories at the expense of stories about joy, humour or success,’ she told The Guardian.
Similarly, Zoya Patel has reflected on her early assumptions about writing as a woman of colour. ‘I believed readers were only interested in people like me if we were traumatised, not triumphant,’ she wrote. ‘Diverse characters were only interesting when they overcame adversity.’
These concerns point to a broader question: when trauma becomes a publishing expectation, what happens to the rest of the story?
The burden of re-telling trauma narratives
Beyond the content of the books, there is the impact on authors themselves. Writing trauma narratives, especially memoir, can be re-traumatising. Amani Haydar has spoken about the emotional labour of promoting her book and hearing from readers with similar experiences. ‘It brought me a sense of closure and justice that I’d struggled to find elsewhere,’ she said, but also noted the toll of continually revisiting her story.
Publishers, too, are beginning to reckon with the ethics of ‘commercialising someone’s trauma,’ as Booksellers Association CEO Robbie Egan put it in the same article. Some are adopting trauma-informed publishing approaches, which offer psychological support and more precise boundaries around promotion and audience engagement.
Beyond trauma narratives: expanding the story
None of this is to suggest that trauma narratives shouldn’t be told. In many cases, they are acts of truth-telling, resistance and healing. They have brought urgent social issues into the public square, from institutional abuse to domestic violence to the ongoing impact of colonisation. But as the dominance of these stories continues, the literary sector must also make space for joy, satire, intimacy and imagination.
Not all powerful writing needs to hurt. As Jeanine Leane puts it, the stories worth telling include laughter, strength and survival, not just the scars we carry, but the lives we build beyond them.
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