AustLit

'What does it look like to tell your own story about love, faith, home and history? It looks like a collection of prose and poetry titled Sweatshop Women written by women from Indigenous, migrant and refugee backgrounds. Writers who courageously tackle difficult themes that demand of us our attention. Sweatshop Women are a collective of new writers based in Western Sydney that was established in 2018 to support women from Indigenous and culturally diverse backgrounds. The collection showcases stories from writers who show us what it means to reclaim a narrative that was taken from them. The powerfully relevant collection is reminder of the importance for a community to come together to tell their own stories away from the lens of the powerful. It is a reminder to resist the objectification of marginalisation. The stories published in the anthology are unsurprisingly as diverse as the authors themselves. The identity of the writers range from countries that border the Indian Ocean, South East Asia, South Central Asia, East Asia, West Africa, East Africa, South America, South Central Asia, including writers who are native to Polynesia, Indigenous, and African American. The critically diverse writers illustrate their understanding about the human condition represented in the stories through prose and poetry – crafting stories that are quiet often untold or deemed unimportant.' (Introduction)