Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity

Judges' comments

Personal Score is a hybrid of memoir and poetry against the backdrop of an in-depth exploration of sport on the Australian continent. In this book, Ellen van Neerven has created an endearing personal and political treatise on sport and sport culture, examining their various histories through the lenses of race, gender and sexuality. Though many sports are touched on and some explored in depth, the focus is on football and the larger story unfolds through van Neerven’s enduring love for the beautiful game.

With remarkable breadth and clarity, van Neerven deftly examines the complex relationships between sport, culture, racism, queerness, identity and colonisation in Australia. This book is innovative in style, multidimensional in depth and an insightful exploration of community formation, desire, ancestry and the act of ‘play’, particularly throughout the years of the global Covid pandemic.