Author talk with Eloise Grills

Part feminist manifesto, part comic book, big beautiful female theory is a carnivalesque exploration of the ways identity is formed through culture, relationships and the weight of society’s expectations. Without falling into a simple recovery narrative, these essays also resonate with humour, which gives a sense of delight and optimism in defiance of difficult circumstances and unfair patriarchal structures.

With breathtaking honesty and fierce wit, Eloise Grills turns her life, her body and her mind into art, confronting what it means to grow up in an increasingly unfathomable world.

About Eloise

Eloise Grills is an award-winning artist and writer living on Dja Dja Wurrung land. Her illustrated memoir-in-essays, big beautiful female theory, is out now with Affirm Press. Her work has been published by The Nib, The Rumpus, Meanjin, The Saturday Paper and others. Her comics, poetry and essays have won the Melbourne Writers’ Prize, the Lifted Brow x RMIT nonFictionLab Experimental Nonfiction Prize, the QPF Prize for Innovation in Spoken Word and the Woollahra Digital Literary Award. Her work has been funded by Creative Victoria, Regional Arts Victoria, the Australia Council and the Copyright Agency. She has published three chapbooks: Dog Park, a comics collaboration with film academic Radha O’Meara published in 2022; Sexy Female Murderesses, a graphic memoir published by Glom Press in 2018; and the Mary-Gilmore-award-shortlisted If you’re sexy and you know it slap your hams, published by Subbed In in 2019.

About Madeleine

Madeleine Gray is a writer and critic from Sydney. Her debut novel, Green Dot, is forthcoming with Allen & Unwin in 2023. She was a 2021 Finalist for the Walkley Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism, and has written for such publications as Overland, Meanjin, The Monthly, SRB, and the TLS. She has an MSt in English Literature from the University of Oxford and is a current doctoral candidate at the University of Manchester.