'Natalie D-Napoleon is a writer, singer-songwriter and educator from Fremantle with an MA in Creative Writing currently working on her PhD. She came to prominence on the poetry scene when she won the 2018 Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize with ‘First Blood: A Sestina’. Also titled First Blood, her debut collection explores various histories—her own, her forebears’, and the wider histories of identity and place. D-Napoleon grew up on a farm on the outskirts of Perth worked by her Croatian-immigrant parents. Her childhood is embedded in that landscape, that culture, and the realisation that the world is much larger. The poems vividly render a girlhood and coming of age coloured by the experience of dislocation.' (Introduction)