Ellena Savage

Bleak, bleak, bleak!

The word ‘bleak’ has often dogged J.M. Coetzee’s fiction. Placing his most recent book of short stories within his complete oeuvre, Ellena Savage uncovers the comic sensibility that suffuses Coetzee’s treatment of sex, morals, and civilisation.

Can the Baby Speak?

I want to live in a classless society

My skin is white, or rather it is a soft, warm pink, which is the colour of the skin of the most dangerous and successful pillagers in recent times. I descend from them. I am them. Nothing is random. I am capable of killing another person but I wo...

Fingers Stained with Fruit and Ink

Savage spends the entire collection telling us she’s playing at being an intellectual – that it’s a ruse, yet another trick – and all the while the book provides an object lesson in the many ways that’s simply not true. The un-small line of her vi...

Does Trauma Need a Witness?

We might, for the sake of simplicity, call a human body a result of the things it has eaten and the things it has excreted; the things it has said and done and had said and done to it. The things it has read and pretended to read. The things which...

The Monster is Nobody at All: Yellow City

Ellena Savage knows intrinsically that the self of memoir or personal essay is never singular, fixed and stable.