Brutal. Uncompromising. Magnificent. Complex. Unforgettable. Wild, Fearless Chests is a timely debut short story collection that breaks open the idea of women from a powerful new Australian literary voice, Mandy Beaumont.
She is the explosion, the clamour, the thunder. She is the beat, the rage. She is every piece of violence imagined on the skin. She is the near miss. She is the woman you once were, the woman you could be, the woman you are. She is a triumph of our shared history, is every one of you, is your wild and screaming voice on street corners, is the madwoman you fear you may become. She loves you.
As women’s voices begin to rise together, Mandy Beaumont’s brutal and uncompromising stories are a compelling reminder of the ways in which women have fallen, been dismissed, hurt, hated and loved from afar. These are the stories we have always known, have always heard about and are perhaps just short moments away from.
They are yours, ours, mine. They are booming anger. They are wild love. They are the distorted and the decided, the imagined and the wanted. They are the shaking ground beneath our feet. A powerful call to arms. They compel us to stand tall. To break free. To defy the gaze. To claim our space. Wild, Fearless Chests is the sound of a certain revolution.
Mandy Beaumont’s writing has been called powerful, brutal, magnificent and complex. Her debut short story collection Wild, Fearless Chests was shortlisted for the 2018 Hachette Richell Prize, the 2019 UWAP Dorothy Hewett Award, and a short story from the collection won the Moth International Short Story Award.
Mandy’s work has been a finalist in the Victorian University Short Story Award, the Overland Fair Australia Prize (twice), the Newcastle Short Story Award, the Rachel Funari Award, the ACU Poetry Prize, and the SmokeLong Quarterly Award. She has been a writing resident at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Art, Metro Arts, and at the Wheeler Centre as a Hotdesk fellow.
Her work has been published in Griffith Review, Cordite, Black Inc. Best Poems and The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library Journal, and she has produced large-scale interactive text work for Brisbane Festival, Queensland Poetry Festival, The State Library of Queensland and the Brisbane Writers Festival.
Mandy was also at the helm of the sold-out events; Poetry After Dark at the Zoo nightclub and SPOKEN at the State Library of Queensland, as well as being the Poet in Residence at the State Library of Queensland, and the co-editor of The Idea of Women edition of Overland.
Mandy is currently a PhD candidate at RMIT’s School of Media and Communication, exploring feminist theory and philosophy to complicate literary fiction as an agent for social change. She is also working on her debut novel, due out with Hachette in 2022.
Wild, Fearless Chests is published by Hachette Australia and available from all leading book retailers including Booktopia.
Image: Wild, Fearless Chests (supplied)