YEAR 12 ATAR ENGLISH
Boy Swallows Universe
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INTRODUCTION
This page has been created to support Year 12 ATAR English students who are doing a novel study of Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton.
Created by: Ms Bright | Last updated: February 2021
Sky News Australia. (2019, June 2). Author’s ‘heart and soul’ in debut novel [Video]. https://youtu.be/pdN6PpBCR4k
(Trent Dalton, n.d.)
Trent Dalton
Trent Dalton is a staff writer for the Weekend Australian Magazine and a former assistant editor of The Courier Mail. He’s a two-time winner of a Walkley Award for Excellence in Journalism, a four-time winner of a Kennedy Award for Excellence in NSW Journalism and a four-time winner of the national News Awards Features Journalist of the Year. His debut novel, Boy Swallows Universe, published by HarperCollins in 2018, is a much-loved national bestseller and critically acclaimed, winning the 2019 Indie Book of the Year Award, the MUD Literary Prize, the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing and the People’s Choice Award at the 2019 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. In addition, at the 2019 Australian Book Industry Awards, the book won a record four ABIA Awards, including the prestigious Book of the Year Award. Boy Swallows Universe has been published across thirty-four English language and translation territories.
I’m a journalist who has written thousands of words about the most harrowing stories about Australian life in the suburbs… tragedy, violence, trauma, upheaval, betrayal, death, destruction, families, abandonment, drugs, crime, hope and healing, no hope, no healing … and I’m often reminded by my gut that kicks from the inside sometimes how my own mother’s life story remains the most harrowing story I’ve ever had the strange and often unsettling honour of being a significant part of.
Trent Dalton looked for the joy in some grim parts of his childhood and found a cracking adventure in his memories of a notorious Boggo Road escapee.
REVIEWS
There’s a scene three quarters of the way through Boy Swallows Universe when a man in a grey coat turns up on 17-year-old Eli Bell’s doorstep to deliver a gift. The visit is interrupted by the arrival of three guys with aluminium baseball bats – Terry, the abusive ex-partner of Eli’s mum, and two of his speed-crazed truckie mates.
Hidden behind a sliding-glass door in a built-in wardrobe of Trent Dalton’s childhood home was a secret room, and a red phone. Dalton was 6 when the space was revealed to him by one of his three brothers. Many years later, he realized this was his family’s escape room.
A “foul-mouthed Tom Sawyer” navigates Brisbane’s seamy underbelly in this ambitious, unwieldy Aussie debut.
TEACHER NOTES
Boy Swallows Universe is the beautifully written story of Eli Bell, a boy with big ideas, extraordinary confidence and limited means. Trent Dalton has created an engrossing novel that invites the reader to share and empathise with Eli’s experience. Full of vivid imagery, lyrical writing and magical realism, it will engage students and allow them to examine the following ideas: • What does it mean to be good? • How do our early experiences shape the person we become? • Families are complex and dynamic, and love is shown is a variety of ways.
References
Shakespeare, R. (n.d.) Trent Dalton [Image]. https://www.harpercollins.com.au/press-room/new-trent-dalton-shimmering-skies-boy-swallows-universe-record/