Vale, writer Tracy Sorensen

Tracy Sorensen, who has died at 61, wrote two wildly original novels, including one narrated by a tumour inside a body

Tracy Sorensen has died at the age of 61. Picture: Toby Zerna

Heavy hearts in the book world this week, as fellow writers salute Tracy Sorensen, who died on May 5, and was farewelled in Bathurst, NSW, on Friday.

Tracy grew up in the West Australian town of Carnarvon. After high school she moved to Perth, where she studied journalism at Curtin University between 1981–86. A passionate socialist and environmentalist, she started writing for Green Left Weekly, before moving to Bathurst to live with her partner, Steve, a forest ranger.

Tracy was diagnosed with cancer in 2014, had treatment, and recovered to write two of the most outrageously original novels published in recent years.

Fellow author Charlotte Wood, writing on Instagram, said: “I first met Tracy in 2015, when I worked with her to develop her manuscript for The Lucky Galah. She had emerged from a period of serious illness and was now blazing with determination to finish her novel. She had previously been advised to drop Lucky the galah as narrator but both she and I knew Lucky had to stay.”

Tracy Sorensen’s The Vitals was told from the perspective of a patient’s internal organs

Sorenson liked using a galah as narrator because “I like the disrupting ideas about who gets to be seen as intellectual in this country. Can a regional person possibly have brains? If one is a galah, can one possibly be taken seriously?”

The Lucky Galah was longlisted for the Miles Franklin in 2018.

In 2019, Tracy was selected for the Judy Harris Writer in Residence fellowship at the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre. The fellowship is for writers exploring health-related themes. The result was her second novel, The Vitals, published in 2023, narrated by a tumour and her internal organs.

The Vitals was launched shortly after Tracy learned her cancer had returned.

Peter Craven reviewed it for us, and had this to say: “She has a gorgeous vocabulary – marvellously enhanced and weaponised … talent on show here is boisterous, audacious … It takes a formidable literary self-possession to go this far out of control and still keep the reader guessing.”

In 2020, Tracy contributed to The Australian’s summer recipe collection, offering the world’s most perfect summer meal: “A simple seafood platter with a bowl of salad and a little Tupperware bowl of condensed milk mayonnaise … Serve on platters with little to no ceremony, as if life is always like this. Add a bowl of water with a squeeze of lemon in it to wash fingers. A nutcracker (or an old hammer plus a thick wooden chopping board) can be passed around to help with the shells. Home-cooked potato chips and a fruit salad of mango, banana, pomegranate seeds and mint would complete this subtropical feast. Offer icy-cold Swan draught lager and/or cups of Bushells leaf tea with condensed milk in it, and bring out a box of dark chocolate after-dinner mints.”

Perfection.

Our chief literary critic, Geordie Williamson, said: “Tracy was an incorrigible humanist: deeply caring, always curious, never fazed by the oddity of our collective existence. All the weirdness and pain of the world, she converted into literature of uncommon sanity and warmth. She was an underground legend of Ozlit, and will be deeply missed.”

Condolences to her loved ones. Australian literature is richer for her contribution, and poorer for her death.

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Today’s pages: an astonishing debut by a Melbourne writer (who also lives in Greece) has blown the socks right off the feet of our critic, Jack Marx. Tequila! Where did it come from, and how did it conquer the world? I’ve assembled a list of Notable Books for you, and Peter Craven chats to Philippe Sands, who will be a guest at the Sydney Writers Festival next week.