This Devastating Fever

Written by Sophie Cunningham
Ultimo Press (2022)
The bibliography for This Devastating Fever can be found here.

Shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards (2023)

Sometimes you need to delve into the past, to make sense of the present.

Alice had not expected to spend the first twenty years of the twenty-first century writing about Leonard Woolf. When she stood on Morell Bridge watching fireworks explode from the rooftops of Melbourne at the start of a new millennium, she had only two thoughts. One was: the fireworks are better in Sydney. The other was: was the world’s technology about to crash down around her? The world’s technology did not crash. But there were worse disasters to come: Environmental collapse. The return of fascism. Wars. A sexual reckoning. A plague.

Uncertain of what to do she picks up an unfinished project and finds herself trapped with the ghosts of writers past. What began as a novel about a member of the Bloomsbury set, colonial administrator, publisher and husband of one the most famous English writers of the twentieth century becomes something else altogether.

Complex, heartfelt, darkly funny and deeply moving, this is Sophie Cunningham’s most important book to date – a dazzlingly original novel about what it’s like to live through a time that feels like the end of days, and how we can find comfort and answers in the past.​

Profiles
The Guardian (2022) – Sophie Cunningham on the ‘crazy challenge’ of bringing Leonard and Virginia Woolf to life
Sydney Morning Herald (2022) – ‘I thought, I’m going to die and I won’t have finished this bloody novel’
ABC RN The Book Show (2022) – Sophie Cunningham discusses her latest book This Devastating Fever

Reviews
Canberra Times (2022) – This Devastating Fever by Sophie Cunningham review – The parallels of history cast anew
The Conversation (2022) – Sophie Cunningham’s pandemic novel admits literature can’t save us – but treasures it for trying
Sydney Morning Herald (2022) – It took 16 years to write – good thing this book is a beautiful, significant read
The Saturday Paper (2022) – Sophie Cunningham – This Devastating Fever
Sydney Review of Books (2022) – Sophie Cunningham’s Orbits

Wonder – 175 Years of the Royal Botanic Gardens

Written by Sophie Cunningham and Peter Wilmoth with photographs by Leigh Henningham
Hardie Grant (2021)

They sit in the physical and emotional heart of our city, and have done so for 175 years. Most of us have spent time there, and they mean different things to each of us. The Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne have been a place of calm, a site for reflection, creative inspiration, discovery, romance and even refuge. Anyone who has visited has a story. Now a range of these stories from Victorians from many fields is gathered in the lavish publication Wonder: 175 Years of Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria

Told through conversations with writers Sophie Cunningham and Peter Wilmoth, there are stories of Nick Cave conceiving the first lines of a novel there, of actor and writer Michael Veitch being taught the classics on its lawns, of a marriage that took place just days before COVID-19 began its grim sweep across the world, closing sites such as the Gardens for the first time in history. Boonwurrung Elder Aunty Carolyn Briggs tells stories of Country that reach back through millennia, while Landscape Architect Andrew Laidlaw shares the inspiration for some of the Gardens’ more recent landscapes. Horticulturalist Gemma Cotterell tells us about her work on the Australian Forest Walk; architect Kerstin Thompson reminds us of the secrets the Gardens hold and the way those secrets transform landscape into dreamscape; and botanist Neville Walsh shares his excitement on the discovery of a new species of wattle.

The important matters of plant extinction and climate change (including water usage) are also addressed, reminding the reader of the critical role played by our public gardens in securing the future of the planet through its science, irreplaceable collections and conservation action.

With superb photography by Leigh Henningham, the book is about the people’s gardens, and these stories will resonate with readers who cherish their own experiences there.

Tree Story

Contributing author Sophie Cunningham
Edited by Charlotte Day and Melissa Ratliff
Monash University Museum of Art and Monash University Publishing (2021)

Tree Story brings together creative practices from around the world to create a ‘forest’ of ideas relating to critical environmental and sustainability issues. At its foundation – or roots – are Indigenous ways of knowing and a recognition of trees as our ancestors and family. Produced to accompany a major international group exhibition and podcast, the reader connects tree stories across time and place.

Featuring varied contributions from thirty-three exhibiting artists and projects in a fully illustrated colour section—ranging from early 1970s environmental actions to plant communications—Tree Story includes newly commissioned and republished texts from artists, activists, ecologists, scholars, curators and authors that foreground First Nations’ knowledges, reflect on the rights and agency of trees, explore notions of cultural heritage, reveal knowledge of tree networks and consider loss in times of climate emergency. Together, the diverse contributions in Tree Story pose the question: what can we learn from trees and the importance of Country?

Authors – Brook Garru Andrew, Sissy Eileen Austin, Vanessa I. Cavanagh, Madeleine Collie, Sophie Cunningham, Charlotte Day, Brian Martin, Nick Modrzewski and Suzanne Simard.

Design – Stuart Geddes and Ziga Testen.

Artists – Brook Garru Andrew (AU), Yto Barrada (FR/MA), Berdaguer & Péjus (FR), Joseph Beuys (DE), Tania Bruguera (CU), Hayley Panangka Coulthard (AU), Nici Cumpston (AU), Agnes Denes (HU/US), Yanni Florence (AU), Ceal Floyer (UK), Nicole Foreshew (AU), Henrik Håkansson (SE/DE), Beth Mbitjana Inkamala (AU), Judith Pungarta Inkamala (AU), Tim Johnson (AU), Reena Saini Kallat (IN), Peter Kennedy (AU), Olga Kisseleva (FR), Janet Laurence (AU), MAIX Reserved Forest (MY), Brian Martin (AU), Kent Morris (AU), Peter Mungkuri OAM (AU), Optronics Kinetics (AU), Uriel Orlow (CH/UK), Jill Orr (AU), Katie Paterson (UK), Ed Ruscha (US), Yasmin Smith (AU), Daniel Steegmann Mangrané (BR/ES), Stelarc (AU), Linda Tegg (AU) and The Tree School.

Fire, Flood, Plague: Australian Writers Respond to 2020

Edited by Sophie Cunningham
Penguin Random House (2020)

Fire, Flood, Plague is a vital cultural record of the resilience and humanity needed in these extraordinary times. 2020 began with firestorms raging through the country, followed by floods, and then a global pandemic that has changed how Australians think, feel and live. We all experienced this year differently, but one thing rings true for all of us: this is a year we won’t forget. This anthology brings together original work from a diverse collection of Australian voices, from writers to scientists, journalists to historians, all expressing what 2020 meant to them. They write of ash falling from the sky, fish dying on riverbanks, loved ones lost, loved ones reunited, the historical resonance of fire and plague for Indigenous Australians, geopolitical tensions, the changed nature of travel, friendships rekindled on Zoom, the urgency of the Black Lives Matter movement, the state of the arts and the media, the importance of nurturing our inner lives, communities destroyed and communities rebuilding. 

Contributing writers include Lenore Taylor, Nyadol Nuon, Christos Tsiolkas, Melissa Lucashenko, Billy Griffiths, Jess Hill, Kim Scott, Brenda Walker, Jane Rawson, Omar Sakr, Richard McGregor, Jennifer Mills, Gabrielle Chan, John Birmingham, Tim Flannery, Rebecca Giggs, Kate Cole-Adams, George Megalogenis, James Bradley, Alison Croggon, Melanie Cheng, Kirsten Tranter, Tom Griffiths, Joëlle Gergis and Delia Falconer.

The Guardian (2020 – 2021) – Fire, Flood and Plague – essays about 2020

The Guardian (2020) – Murray-Darling mismanagement: floods, water theft, and Burke and Wills’s camels

“It’s an expertly constructed document of an unforgettable year, with perspectives that remind us how best to live.” – The Australian      

“… each, in their own way, irrefutably moving – is not unlike the slow release of therapy.”– The Saturday Paper      

“The essays are engrossing, weaving the personal, political and philosophical, and their brevity is ideal, making this volume easy to dip in and out of.” – Weekly Book Newsletter

Living with the Anthropocene: Love, Loss and Hope in the Face of Environmental Crisis

Contributing writer Sophie Cunningham
Edited by Cameron Muir, Kirsten Wehner and Jenny Newell
NewSouth (2020)

Australia — and the world — is changing. On the Great Barrier Reef corals bleach white, across the inland farmers struggle with declining rainfall, birds and insects disappear from our gardens and plastic waste chokes our shores. The 2019–20 summer saw bushfires ravage the country like never before and young and old alike are rightly anxious. Human activity is transforming the places we live in and love. In this extraordinarily powerful and moving book, some of Australia's best-known writers and thinkers — as well as ecologists, walkers, farmers, historians, ornithologists, artists and community activists — come together to reflect on what it is like to be alive during an ecological crisis. They build a picture of a collective endeavour towards a culture of care, respect, and attention as the physical world changes around us. How do we hold onto hope? Personal and urgent, this is a literary anthology for our age, the age of humans.

‘“Her [Sophie Cunningham’s] unease highlights a dilemma haunting the entire book: Why write when the world’s ending – or, at least, changing in extraordinary ways? What can authors offer in the Anthropocene?” – The Saturday Paper

Melbourne

Written by Sophie Cunningham
NewSouth (2011 and 2020)

Melbourne's a city you get to know from the inside out – you have to walk it to love it. My favourite time to do this is at night. That's when you capture glimpses of people – eating, laughing, talking, arguing, watching TV and reading – through half-open terrace house doors and windows … It is a city of inside places and conversation. Of intimacy. Melbourne begins on Black Saturday, the day that bushfires tore through the outskirts of Melbourne, destroying the townships of Marysville and Kinglake, shattering thousands of lives. Sophie Cunningham writes about what happened over the year that followed.  Sit through a heatwave, visit the drains underneath the city, participate in a letterpress workshop, wander beside the Yarra, cycle alongside tram tracks and cheer at the footy. Live through the drought before the storm, the rain before yet more fire and days of searing heat. Along the way, be captivated as Cunningham shares her Melbourne, its stories and its characters. In a new introduction, Cunningham returns to Melbourne after a period away and reflects on how much her city has changed since Melbourne was first published in 2011: it is hotter, greener and has endured the rollercoaster ride – from boom times to economic depression – that defined 2020. 

“Cunningham is communicating this city's soul as though it's a person, full of contradictions but with an essential character.” —The Sunday Age 

“This beautiful book provokes nostalgia and deeper thinking about the events, places and people who have defined Melbourne.'”— Herald Sun 

“Cunningham has successfully captured the dynamics of a city in constant flux, while focusing on the essence of its inner life, which gives it an ambience quite unlike that found in any other Australian city.” – The Canberra Times

City of Trees: Essays on Life, Death and the Need for a Forest

Written by Sophie Cunningham
Text Publishing (2019)

Longlisted for The Nib Literary Award (2019)

How do we take in the beauty of our planet while processing the losses? What trees can survive in the city? Which animals can survive in the wild? How do any of us – humans, animals, trees – find a forest we can call home? In these moving, thought-provoking essays Sophie Cunningham considers the meaning of trees and our love of them. She chronicles the deaths of both her fathers, and the survival of P-22, a mountain lion in Griffith Park, Los Angeles; contemplates the loneliness of Ranee, the first elephant in Australia; celebrates the iconic eucalyptus and explores its international status as an invasive species. City of Trees is a powerful collection of nature, travel and memoir writing set in the context of global climate change. It meanders through, circles around and sometimes faces head on the most pressing issues of the day. It never loses sight of the trees.

Griffith Review (2019) – How To Draw A Tree

“[Cunningham’s] naif, free-form style, is a perfect foil for the stories-within-stories-within stories that lie at the heart of this important, entertaining and moving book.” – The Age 

“City of Trees is a sorrowful meditation on the effects of climate change and time, but it is also full of wonder, of hope.” – Kill Your Darlings 

“Cunningham’s essays are accounts of her intimate encounters with trees, her gift is in making them feel like they are our stories as well.” – Australian Book Review

“City of Trees is a deeply ethical and thoughtful call to consciousness, a call to see and feel being in and of the natural world.” – Sydney Review of Books

Warning: The Story of Cyclone Tracy

Written by Sophie Cunningham
Text Publishing (2014)

Shortlisted for the Kibble Literary Award (2015)
Shortlisted for the Chief Minister's Northern Territory History Book Award (2015)
Shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards – University of Southern Queensland History Book Award (2015)
Shortlisted for The Nib Literary Award (2015)
Longlisted for the Walkley Book Award (2014)

The sky at the top end is big and the weather moves like a living thing. You can hear it in the cracking air when there is an electrical storm and as the thunder rolls around the sky … When Cyclone Tracy swept down on Darwin at Christmas 1974, the weather became not just a living thing but a killer. Tracy destroyed an entire city, left seventy-one people dead and ripped the heart out of Australia’s season of goodwill. For the fortieth anniversary of the nation’s most iconic natural disaster, Sophie Cunningham has gone back to the eyewitness accounts of those who lived through the devastation – and those who faced the heartbreaking clean-up and the back-breaking rebuilding. From the quiet stirring of the service-station bunting that heralded the catastrophe to the wholesale slaughter of the dogs that followed it, Cunningham brings to the tale a novelist’s eye for detail and an exhilarating narrative drive. And a sober appraisal of what Tracy means to us now, as we face more – and more destructive – extreme weather with every year that passes. 

Vision – Warning: The Story of Cyclone Tracy

“Literary non-fiction at its absorbing, emotional, instructive best.” – The Weekend Australian     

“… an inspired use of oral archives, and a startling picture, sharply lit by disaster, of Australians as we were in the mid-'70s.” – The Age

“Highly accomplished … compelling.” – Sydney Morning Herald

“Cunningham has pieced together a pacey and energetic insight into the build-up, experience and aftermath of the cyclone … It’s a great read and, given the subject, it is strangely hopeful.” – The Big Issue

Bird

Written by Sophie Cunningham
Text Publishing (2008)

To her lovers and friends, Anna Davidoff was a mystery. Beautiful, charismatic, irresponsible yet disarming; famous, in a way, but ultimately unknowable. To her daughter, she is no less an enigma even now, thirty years after her death. Of course, Ana-Sofia knows the stories of Anna’s unlikely transformations. How the young post-war refugee from a devastated Soviet Union became a Hollywood starlet, a muse to jazz greats, a friend of the Beats – and along the way a heroin addict. How later, ordained as a Buddhist nun, she died alone in a Himalayan cave at the age of forty-three. The stories, too, are famous. But now Ana-Sofia is the same age Anna was when she died. Successful, content, single in New York City and hopeful of new love. And Anna has begun to haunt her. This spellbinding novel is an exquisite depiction of the equivocal bond between mother and daughter against the traumas and social upheavals of the mid-twentieth century.

Bird is currently out of print, but available as an eBook.

Geography

Written by Sophie Cunningham
Text Publishing (2004)

Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book, South East Asia (2004)

Just getting on a plane made me want sex. From the moment I sat down and pulled the belt tight there was a heat that grew until all I was aware of was a pulsing, the movement of blood … For Catherine, travel is about many things other than getting from here to there. Cities, for instance, and what cities do to people; the perils of geography and the excuses people use to keep others at a distance. It is about loss and longing, and the possibility of escape. And in the years after her first meeting with Michael in Los Angeles it is all about obsessive desire and damage. On a beach in Sri Lanka, Catherine and her new friend Ruby get to talking, deep into a tropical night. ‘Tell me,’ Ruby says. ‘I like stories.’ So, Catherine tells the story of the one who drove her crazy. Sophie Cunningham’s first novel is a fearless evocation of a woman losing herself to the idea of love. It will remind you how easy it is to cross the line, and how hard it can be to get back.

Geography is currently out of print, but available as an eBook.