Foray into sport's underbelly wins top award

Tackling the dark side of the AFL was a challenge on many levels for Melbourne author and Deakin PhD student, Anna Krien.

Yet her book “Night Games: Sex, Power and a Journey into the Dark Heart of Sport” is likely to have an indelible effect on Australia’s dominant sporting culture.

Ms Krien has been awarded the world’s richest sports literary prize - the $47,000 UK William Hill Sports Book of the Year award - and is only the second woman to do so, in the award’s 26-year history.

The William Hill award is known for selecting books that explore individual struggles and the darker side of sport, such as doping - with the first female winner being Lauren Hillenbrand, for her book on the champion racehorse "Seabiscuit."

Since it was first published in 2012, “Night Games” has received accolades from within Australia and overseas. It has had three print runs and made the “2014 Best Book” lists of the three major UK daily newspapers.

Exposing the problematic sexual politics of Australia’s football and wider sporting culture, “Night Games” centres on the rape trial of a young AFL footballer that followed an incident on the day of the 2010 AFL Grand Final. Krien became engrossed in the trial, noticing gaps in the legal process, which, she says, became obvious to her “as an outsider, who was not a traditional sports journalist.”

While researching the book, she experienced opposition from the football fraternity and a few Australian sports writers themselves, who argued that she lacked suitable sporting credentials. Yet she argues that it was probably this distance that helped her to perceive the darker aspects of the culture.

“As a writer, I have always been interested in tackling subjects that challenged my moral compass,” she said.

“I like to examine my own biases and everyone else’s. Afterwards, we all feel uncomfortable because we have been taken out of our comfort zones.”

Krien has also tackled environmental activism, in the prize-winning book “Into the Woods: The Battle for Tasmania's Forests,” and animal ethics, in the Quarterly Essay “Us and Them: On the Importance of Animals.” Other short stories, articles and essays have been published in numerous publications, including “The Age” and “The Monthly.”

As well as busily managing two very small children, Ms Krien is now enjoying the challenge of being back in academia, after receiving a scholarship to undertake her PhD in creative writing within Deakin’s School of Communication and Creative Arts. The PhD marks her second sojourn at Deakin, with her undergraduate degree in Professional Writing also undertaken at the university.

“I had good memories of studying at Deakin,” she said. “I like to dip in and out of reportage and academia, so that I also have time to focus on creative projects.”

As an “outsider,” Ms Krien said that researching “Night Games” provided tremendous insight into the influence of sport on our culture.

“In the overall picture, sport has been a male domain for so long, whereas women are relatively new to it,” she explained.

“It was only with the widespread use of the bicycle just over 100 years ago - and related changes in fashion - that women began to be actively involved in sport. The bicycle helped to give women the opportunity to experience the joy of being physical themselves and to take a sense of agency from those who had held the reins for so long.”

In the scheme of things, much progress has been made. With the efforts of fearless critics like Anna Krien, we can hope that the scales of power in sport will become somewhat more even.