PERSONAL SCORE
Sport, Culture, Identity
A vital and deeply personal testament to self, family, community, culture, and sport.
Award-winning writer Ellen van Neerven plays soccer from a young age, learning early on that while sport can lead to exhilarating experiences and community-building, it can also be a painful and exclusive world. The more they play, the more they realize about sport’s troubled relationship with race, gender, and sexuality – and question what it means to play sport on stolen, sovereign land, especially in the midst of multiple environmental crises.
Formidable, poetic, and impassioned, Personal Score is improbably many things at once,
A vital and deeply personal testament to self, family, community, culture, and sport.
Award-winning writer Ellen van Neerven plays soccer from a young age, learning early on that while sport can lead to exhilarating experiences and community-building, it can also be a painful and exclusive world. The more they play, the more they realize about sport’s troubled relationship with race, gender, and sexuality – and question what it means to play sport on stolen, sovereign land, especially in the midst of multiple environmental crises.
Formidable, poetic, and impassioned, Personal Score is improbably many things at once, simultaneously a rumination on sport, relationship to land, Indigenous rights, trans inclusion, and race. Van Neerven weaves broad cultural touchstones, such as Zinedine Zidane’s red card in the 2006 World Cup finals, with quiet moments playing soccer with their family, biking to and from practice, detailing a competitive and amorous relationship with a teammate, and simply enthralled by observing the landscape.
Fierce, original, and also abundantly tender, Personal Score is a ground-breaking book that demonstrates van Neerven’s unrivalled talent and courage.
- Two Dollar Radio
- Paperback
- April 2024
- 360 Pages
- 9781953387455
Buy the Book
$18.95
About Ellen Van Neerven
Praise
“Personal Score is at once an analysis of the coloniality of sport and the Indigeneity of sport. Its scope is breathtakingly vast – Ellen van Neerven weaves together the autobiographical, the historical, and the sociopolitical so expertly, and, in doing so, demonstrates a new way to write toward Indigenous freedom. Personal Score hums with the vitality and intelligence of a definitive text.”
–Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of A History of My Brief Body and A Minor Chorus
“Sport plays a central role in Australian life, yet remains one of the final frontiers of reckoning with who belongs within it and who has been discarded in its journey towards ubiquity. This work lays bare the many unspoken threads tangled up in modern Australian sport, from relationships with bodies to relationships with land, and highlights the paradox of sport as both a liberator and exterminator of difference, as told from the perspective of a queer First Nations writer – of which this space contains so few. Splicing together personal memoir with history, journalism, and throbbing poetry, this is a crucial interjection into the myths we tell about ourselves as a sporting nation, coalescing in a new and necessary kind of sports writing.”
–Samantha Lewis, Australian Football Writer for ABC Sport
“Van Neerven’s prose is intimate and alive, their sentences arc like a fluid pass, linking complex insights with biographical reflections… An eloquent statement and a reminder that whatever is written about sport on these lands should be built on the recognition of what came before and still survives.”
–Jackie Tang, Readings
“Weaving together race, Indigeneity, sports, sexuality, gender, class and Country, they offer something no sport historian has… a beautiful story of Blackfulla love – for sport, for Country.”
–Chelsea Watego, The Conversation
“Ellen van Neerven asks a direct and profound question: ‘What does it mean to play sport on First Nations land?” … Van Neerven, through their own experiences as player and spectator, asks us to consider what we value most about sport and how we can nurture and protect it.”
–Tony Birch, The Saturday Paper