Tanya Vavilova - We Are Speaking in Code

Join us for the launch of Tanya Vavilova's essay collection We Are Speaking in Code, which explores difference & deviance in the everyday through the lenses of mental illness, queerness & migrant identity.  

 

Tanya reconsiders and unravels ideas of belonging, identity and the way we operate in the world.   

 

To be launched by Richard Glover!   

 

This is a FREE event. Drinks and nibbles provided.    

 

About the Book 

We Are Speaking in Code explores difference and deviance in the everyday through the lenses of mental illness, queerness and migrant identity. Weaving personal anecdotes with reflections on trauma, psychology and contemporary relationships this collection of essays catalogues, reconsiders and unravels ideas of belonging, identity and the way we operate in the world.   

 

Opening with a visit ‘home’ to Moscow where she speaks an alphabet-soup Russian, Vavilova tries to connect with her mother and grandmother. The titular essay starts one of the central conversations of the book; what does it mean to be a migrant whose identity is impossible in the land of their forebears and highly complicated in their home. Vavilova also tackles the millennial preoccupations of finding meaningful paid work, navigating dating in the tech age and the perils of building a living as an artist.   

 

Bridging social, emotional and geographic distances, Vavilova’s essays look for ways to live on the edges, with grace, humour and lucid rage.  

 

About the Author

Tanya Vavilova’s essays and short stories have been published in Meanjin, The Lifted Brow, Seizure, the Mascara Literary Review, Slow Canoe and the UTS Writers’ Anthology, among other places. Her short story ‘Artichoke Hearts’  won the Wollongong Writers Festival Short Story Prize in 2018. She was recently awarded the Writers NSW Varuna Fellowship and was a Bundanon Trust Artist-in-Residence in 2019. We are Speaking in Code is her first book.