Renée Sarojini Saklikar – författare

One afternoon, in an old house in an abandoned village on the outskirts of Perimeter, in the place they call Pacifica, Bramah and the beggar boy find fragments of an ancient text in an oak box. Hunched over scraps of parchment and broken computer disks, they blow the dust off a cover, and so our story begins.

Steeped in the tradition of fairy tales, The Heart of This Journey Bears All Patterns (THOT J BAP) features a world in which a small band of resisters and survivors meet heartbreak and destruction with rhymes and resourceful skills such as soap and glass making, and a belief in the supernatural. Many things happen—some good, but most bad—including five eco-catastrophes and a viral bio-contagion. Shapeshifting in and out of it all is the nimble Bramah, a female locksmith, part human, part goddess—brown, brave and beautiful. Ten years in the making and described as “truly ambitious” by Stephen Collis, this work by award-winning poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar spans continents and centuries. Bramah and the Beggar Boy is the first instalment of the multi-part series.

The ambitious second instalment of Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s epic fantasy saga in verse, The Heart of This Journey Bears All Patterns (THOT J BAP).

This book-length poem features the time-travelling demigoddess Bramah, a locksmith and the saga’s hero. In Bramah’s Quest, the year is 2087 and Bramah is back on a planet Earth ravaged by climate change and global inequality. Bramah is on a quest to find her people, including the little boy Raphael, last seen at the end of Bramah and the Beggar Boy (2021). Hailed as “brilliant and masterful, timely” (Kerry Gilbert), this long poem reclaims poetry forms such as blank verse, the sonnet, the ballad and the madrigal. Each page is a portal, connecting readers to the resistance of seed savers, craftspeople, scientists and orphans, all banded together to help save their world from eco-catastrophe and injustice.

Ten years in the making, Bramah’s Quest weaves poetry with politics to create an epic family saga that is also a meditation on good and evil and a “real page turner” (Meredith Quartermain). Bramah, “brown, brave and beautiful,” is determined to conquer the odds and deal with what fate and chance throw in her path. Each twist and turn tests her ability to live up to the motto “Let all evil die and the good endure.”

Our journey begins under the gaze of The Faery Godmother by cover artist Ashley Rose Goentoro. We step into a ghost story ''Man with Golden Helmet'' by feature author Renée Sarojini Saklikar. Dawn Lo in ''Little Snowflake Girls'' and Weiwei Xu in ''Chimera'' introduce us to young people exploring meaningful questions of identity and belonging. Like trailside inukshuks, memories pile up and tumble away in ''Moons of Saturn'' by James Dorr, ''Practising the Art of Forgetting'' by Soramimi Hanarejima, and ''Starry Nights'' by David Milne. AJ Lee, in ''What Kind of Story'', and Magpie winners Charlene Kwiatkowski, Maria Ford, and Cara Waterfall delight with their bewitching words. Solutions to two very different puzzles emerge with Susan Pieters in ''Hoax'' and Cameron MacDonald in ''Mourgadze''. Whether by way of closet or carriage, keeping safe means keeping up appearances for Frankie Ray in ''The Sleuth with the Platinum Hair'' by Mel Anastasiou and Toinette in ''The Shepherdess: Versailles'' by JM Landels.