No Document

Shortlisted for the 2022 Stella Prize

No Document is an elegy for a friendship cut short prematurely by death. The memory of this friendship becomes a model for how we might relate to others in sympathy, solidarity and rebellion. At once intimate and expansive, Anwen Crawford's book-length essay explores loss in many forms: disappeared artworks, effaced histories, abandoned futures. From the turmoil of grief and the solace of memory, her perspective embraces histories of protest and revolution, art-making and cinema, border policing, and especially our relationships with animals. No Document shows how love and resistance echo through time.

Anwen Crawford is best known for her writing as a critic, but here she draws on her background as a zine-maker and visual artist, and her training in poetry, to develop a new way of writing about the past, using a symphonic method of composition and collage. No Document is an urgent, groundbreaking work of non-fiction that reimagines the boundaries that divide us as people, nations and species, and asks how we can create forms of solidarity that endure.

'In this arresting book, Anwen Crawford reckons with the death of a close friend and comrade. Seeking a language suitable for grief, Crawford stitches together material from a wide range of sources in a poetic and allusive manner reminiscent of Susan Howe or perhaps a miniature Arcades Project. But this is no insular work of autobiography... A deeply moving anatomy of personal and political melancholy, No Document speaks as directly to the dead as it does to its reader.' - Joshua Barnes, Books+Publishing