Murriyang

Shortlisted for the 2025 ABIA Awards, Social Impact Book of the Year

Stan Grant is talking to his country in a new way. In his most poetic and inspiring work yet, he offers a means of moving beyond the binaries and embracing a path to peace and forgiveness, rooted in the Wiradjuri spiritual practice of Yindyamarra – deep silence and respect.

Murriyang, in part Grant’s response to the Voice referendum, eschews politics for love. In this gorgeous, grace-filled book, he zooms out to reflect on the biggest questions, ranging across the history, literature, theology, music and art that has shaped him. Setting aside anger for kindness, he reaches past the secular to the sacred and transcendent.

Informed by spiritual thinkers from around the world, Murriyang is a Wiradjuri prayer in one long uninterrupted breath, challenging Western notions of linear time in favour of deep, circular time – the Dreaming.

Murriyang is also very personal, each meditation interleaved with a memory of Grant’s father, a Wiradjuri cultural leader. It asks how any of us can say goodbye to those we love.

This is a book for our current moment, and something for the ages.

About the Author

Stan Grant is a Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi man. He is a public intellectual who has worked as a journalist, presenter, filmmaker and author. In his journalism he has reported from more than 80 countries, won three Walkley Awards, a Logie Award and four Asia TV Awards. As a writer he has published seven books including the bestselling Talking to My Country, which won the Walkley Book Award. In 2016, he was appointed to the Referendum Council on Indigenous recognition. In 2018, he was appointed Professor of Global Affairs at Griffith University. The full-length documentary film The Australian Dream won the 2019 AACTA Award for best feature documentary and the 2019 Walkley Documentary Award. In 2020, he became the International Affairs Analyst at the ABC and the Vice-Chancellor's Chair of Australian-Indigenous Belonging at Charles Sturt University. From 2022–23, Grant hosted the ABC’s current affairs panel program Q+A.