
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
* 2025 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction — Longlist. A vital and deeply personal testament to self, family, community, culture, and sport.
Award-winning writer Ellen van Neerven plays soccer from a young age, learning early on that while sport can lead to exhilarating experiences and community-building, it can also be a painful and exclusive world. The more they play, the more they realize about sport’s troubled relationship with race, gender, and sexuality – and question what it means to play sport on stolen, sovereign land, especially in the midst of multiple environmental crises.
Formidable, poetic, and impassioned, Personal Score is improbably many things at once, simultaneously a rumination on sport, relationship to land, Indigenous rights, trans inclusion, and race. Van Neerven weaves broad cultural touchstones, such as Zinedine Zidane’s red card in the 2006 World Cup finals, with quiet moments playing soccer with their family, biking to and from practice, detailing a competitive and amorous relationship with a teammate, and simply enthralled by observing the landscape.
Fierce, original, and also abundantly tender, Personal Score is a ground-breaking book that demonstrates van Neerven’s unrivalled talent and courage.
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Information
Table of contents
- Pregame
- I Want to Play
- Very Athletic People
- Sugar Fields
- Gender Police
- I’m Afraid of Women
- Confidence Game
- Every Goal and Every Miss
- Protest in Sport (A small selection, 1957–2023)
- The Bike Path
- Skills
- Lesbian Mafia
- Bookmarks
- Flooding My Sentences
- Country Is Like the Body
- Taking a Stand Against a Name
- Personal Score
- Birds and Football (Three portraits)
- Australia Is Open (To hold! Receive! Take!)
- Team EvN
- What I Want When I Want You
- Family Is a Stadium
- Our Descendants Are Watching
- Storying Care
- France 2019
- Virus in a Scorched Land
- What Survival Feels Like
- 2023
- Trans Sporting Utopias
- Challenging the Binary
- My Existence
- Invasion Day Spin Class
- Am I Public Space?
- Tapestries of Poison
- The Pain Game
- As Country
- How to Play Sport on Indigenous Land
- Postgame
- References