Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity

by Ellen Van Neerven

Overview

A vital and deeply personal testament to self, family, community, culture, and sport.

Award-winning writer Ellen van Neerven plays soccer from a young age, learning early on that while sport can lead to exhilarating experiences and community-building, it can also be a painful and exclusive world. The more they play, the more they realize about sport’s troubled relationship with race, gender, and sexuality – and question what it means to play sport on stolen, sovereign land, especially in the midst of multiple environmental crises.

Formidable, poetic, and impassioned, Personal Score is improbably many things at once, simultaneously a rumination on sport, relationship to land, Indigenous rights, trans inclusion, and race. Van Neerven weaves broad cultural touchstones, such as Zinedine Zidane’s red card in the 2006 World Cup finals, with quiet moments playing soccer with their family, biking to and from practice, detailing a competitive and amorous relationship with a teammate, and simply enthralled by observing the landscape.

Fierce, original, and also abundantly tender, Personal Score is a ground-breaking book that demonstrates van Neerven’s unrivalled talent and courage.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781953387462
Publisher:	Two Dollar Radio
Publication date:	04/09/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Ellen Van Neerven (they/them) is an award-winning writer of Mununjali Yugambeh and Dutch heritage. Ellen’s first book, Heat and Light, was the recipient of the David Unaipon Award, the Dobbie Literary Award and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Indigenous Writers’ Prize. They are the author of two poetry collections: Comfort Food, which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize; and Throat, which won the Kenneth Slessor Prize, the Multicultural NSW Award and Book of the Year in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. They live in Brisbane.

Editorial Reviews

[A] brilliant collection of essays in which Ellen van Neerven masterfully interrogates [soccer’s] relationship to the land, to First Nations, to tradition, to sexuality and to gender.”
—Karla J. Strand, Ms Magazine

“A thought-provoking and complex look at the different factors that come into play whenever sports are involved.”
—Tobias Carroll, InsideHook

"I’ve always been interested in books that drill down on a specific topic in such a way that we also learn something unexpected about the world around us. Australian writer Van Neerven’s sports memoir is so much more than that, as they explore the relationship between sports and race, gender, and sexuality—as well as the paradox of playing a colonialist sport on Indigenous lands."
—Claire Kirch, The Millions

"Personal Score is at once an analysis of the coloniality of sport and the Indigeneity of sport. Its scope is breathtakingly vast – Ellen van Neerven weaves together the autobiographical, the historical, and the sociopolitical so expertly, and, in doing so, demonstrates a new way to write toward Indigenous freedom. Personal Score hums with the vitality and intelligence of a definitive text."
—Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of A History of My Brief Body and A Minor Chorus

"Sport plays a central role in Australian life, yet remains one of the final frontiers of reckoning with who belongs within it and who has been discarded in its journey towards ubiquity. This work lays bare the many unspoken threads tangled up in modern Australian sport, from relationships with bodies to relationships with land, and highlights the paradox of sport as both a liberator and exterminator of difference, as told from the perspective of a queer First Nations writer – of which this space contains so few. Splicing together personal memoir with history, journalism, and throbbing poetry, this is a crucial interjection into the myths we tell about ourselves as a sporting nation, coalescing in a new and necessary kind of sports writing."
—Samantha Lewis, Australian Football Writer for ABC Sport

"Van Neerven’s prose is intimate and alive, their sentences arc like a fluid pass, linking complex insights with biographical reflections... An eloquent statement and a reminder that whatever is written about sport on these lands should be built on the recognition of what came before and still survives."
—Jackie Tang, Readings

"Weaving together race, Indigeneity, sports, sexuality, gender, class and Country, they offer something no sport historian has... a beautiful story of Blackfulla love – for sport, for Country."
—Chelsea Watego, The Conversation

"Ellen van Neerven asks a direct and profound question: 'What does it mean to play sport on First Nations land?'' ... Van Neerven, through their own experiences as player and spectator, asks us to consider what we value most about sport and how we can nurture and protect it."
—Tony Birch, The Saturday Paper

From the Publisher