Kathryn Crowcroft's debut book, Tongue, is published this week and explores how the tongue has been cast as both sacred and sinful across centuries
I hope that the book can demonstrate the material nature of language – the physical realities that speech and silence can create – while remaining attentive to its slipperiness and suppleness.
Kathryn Crowcroft
A Gates Cambridge Scholar has published her first book, a hybrid work of lyric non-fiction, which deals with issues ranging from gendered violence and control and intergenerational silence to the politics of testimony.
Kathryn Crowcroft’s book Tongue, is accompanied by images, including historical illustrations, engravings, paintings and handwritten notes.
The book is framed through Kathryn’s research into the tongue and its untold cultural significance. It explores how the organ has been cast as both sacred and sinful across centuries.
It follows a young researcher who works in a university archive and is intent on unveiling the history of the human tongue, its strange metaphors and hidden uses. The archival materials conjure memories, transporting the researcher home to the silence that exists between herself and her mother. Alongside her academic work, she begins a second manuscript through which a personal reckoning takes place in which she confronts her struggle to articulate the unspoken legacy that has shaped her past.
The blurb states: “Written in the shadow of gendered violence, and attuned to the ways in which we speak and avoid speaking, the book offers a fierce, sensitive and unique articulation of the truths we learn to lie for. Tongue creates a radical space for silence to resonate – and an exploration of how a voice might piece together what has been severed.”
Kathryn [2011] adds: “Its form evolved naturally as a nodal essay with each cell connected, piecing together the long-lost flesh of the unspoken words between a mother and daughter. In this way, I hoped that the book could demonstrate the material nature of language – the physical realities that speech and silence can create – while remaining attentive to its slipperiness and suppleness.”
Kathryn’s writing has been published in Prototype, The Weekend Review, The Best Australian Poems series and elsewhere. She held a Copyright Agency Creative Writing Fellowship after completing her doctorate in English as a twice-awarded Gates Cambridge scholar. At Cambridge she won the John Kinsella and Brewer Hall prizes for poetry.
The book is published by Giramondo in Australia and New Zealand this week and will be published by Catapult in the US on 30th March 2027 and by Akoya in the UK on February 18th 2027.
