Trent Dalton reveals Boy Swallows Universe origin story and his next ‘murder-mystery’ project

The Aussie star behind global streaming hit Boy Swallows Universe has revealed its surprising unknown origin story, while admitting to “dread” around his next project.

Fans of Boy Swallows Universe,get keen – the star Australian author behind the global streaming hit has a new novel coming out, and it is his most intimate project yet.

Revealing he has just finished writing Gravity Let Me Go, which wraps together themes of true crime and relationships, Trent Dalton acknowledged feeling “profound gratitude and crippling dread” because “this might be the most personal book I’ve ever written”.

Dalton also shared a little-known story about the humble origins of his semi-autobiographical 2018 debut, Boy Swallows Universe, which became a No1 bestseller and was turned into a TV smash by Netflix last year.

He said as a young journalist two decades ago he had tried writing a book, largely to distract himself from the “troubled nocturnal ramblings” of his eccentric rental housemate, a British WWII veteran “who conversed at length with his ginger cat every night after six VB tallies”.

‘A marriage story buried inside a murder-mystery’ … that’s how Trent Dalton, pictured with wife Fiona Franzmann, is describing his deeply personal new book Gravity Let Me Go. Photo: Lyndon Mechielsen

“I called this book Armour. The title came from the fact my three older brothers and I were obsessed with the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table,” Dalton wrote in The Daily Telegraph.

“All the streets where we grew up in this particular Housing Commission cluster of Bracken Ridge, Brisbane, were named after Arthur and his knights … I always thought it was so hopeful and optimistic that a place bursting daily with innumerable social sores was named after such romantic and noble figures of mythology.

“I feverishly devoted 40,000 words to Armour before I wisely realised it was a load of garbage and I swapped bad writing for reading the works of good writers and, after doing that for 18 years, I turned the bones of Armour into my first novel, Boy Swallows Universe.”

That storywas an award-winner at home and topped the streaming charts in the US. Dalton revealed he has only watched the show in full once; however he has repeatedly viewed the closing scene, because it reminds him of the one thing he longed for as a child, in vain: that his estranged parents “might one day be able to live together”.

‘I might be able to convince myself that it’s real’ … Felix Cameron as Eli Bell, the character based on Trent Dalton’s own life, with his on-screen mum Phoebe Tonkin in Boy Swallows Universe.

“Then Netflix came along and turned that book into a series and added on a scene at the end that showed me exactly what such a world might have looked like,” he wrote. “Maybe I think if I watch that scene enough times I might be able to convince myself that it’s real.”

The new novel, Gravity Let Me Go, will be published in late September by HarperCollins. Like Dalton, its protagonist is a married father-of-two and a journalist. And like three of his other hits – Boy Swallows Universe, Love Stories and Lola In The Mirror – it is also set in Brisbane.

He told The Daily Telegraph: “It’s a marriage story buried inside a murder-mystery … my aim was to write something that might feel familiar to the eight-million-plus married people in this country and to the 70 per cent of Australians who live in the suburbs, while also being my version of a rattling noir-ish whodunit.”

Winner with a humble backstory … Trent Dalton (right) with Boy Swallows Universe stars at the AACTA Awards on February 7, 2025. Picture: Annette Dew.