Come along to the official Book Landing of Hopeless Kingdom by Kgshak Akec!
The official book landing for Kgshak Akec's award-winning debut novel will be held at The Common on Geelong's Waterfront. Register for your ticket.
Details:
- Saturday 4th of February 2023 7 PM AEDT
- The Common - Geelong Waterfront 1 Gheringhap St, Geelong VIC 3220
- Registration essential via Eventbrite.
Hopeless Kingdom is the winner of The 2021 Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript.
Akita’s family have always kept moving to survive. Sudan to Cairo. Cairo to Sydney. Sydney to Geelong.
Each new place challenges Akita, her siblings and her parents. Just when eight-year-old Akita is feeling settled for the first time in her life, her parents decide to relocate to Geelong. The move is the beginning of a downward spiral that threatens to unravel the fabric of their family and any hope for finding peace and belonging. Told through the interchanging perspectives of Akita and her mother, Taresai, this coming of age story shines a light on the generational curses of trauma, complex family dynamics, and how it feels to love someone unconditionally, even when it hurts. Individually, the female narrators experience racism, rejection and despair, but together their narratives reveal a resilience of spirit and determination to transcend expectations of what a daughter, a sister, and a mother can be. Hopeless Kingdom gives a voice to the silent heartache of searching for acceptance in an adopted society which can’t look past the surface of skin colour.
Hopeless Kingdom is available for purchase.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kgshak Akec is a writer, a poet, and a lover of words, and Hopeless Kingdom is her debut novel. She is currently a master’s candidate in Creative Writing at Deakin University, and an artist in residence at Somebody’s Daughter Theatre Company in Melbourne. From the moment she learned how to write in English at the age of six, Kgshak has been writing out the stories that live inside her mind. Fascinated by human experience, the untold words and unsung songs of the day-to-day, as an early-career writer, Kgshak finds herself drawn to stories that transport and are grounded in truth. Her deep love of stories and world-building is existential.
