The winners of the Public Anthropologist Award 2026 are Edward Narain and Tarryn Phillips for their book Sugar: An Ethnographic Novel (University of Toronto Press, 2024). Narain is a Fijian political analyst, researcher, and writer. Phillips is a medical anthropologist and sociolegal scholar in the Department of Social Inquiry at La Trobe University. The book is an innovative contribution to contemporary anthropology, blending ethnographic insight with the narrative power of fiction. Set in Fiji, the novel traces interconnected lives shaped by inequality, care, and postcolonial histories, rendering the lived realities of structural violence with depth and nuance. By moving beyond conventional academic forms, Sugar demonstrates the analytical and public potential of experimental ethnographic writing. It offers a compelling example of engaged anthropology, one that not only interprets the world but invites readers to confront its moral and political complexities.
Antonio: Your book adopts the form of an ethnographic novel. How did writing through fiction reshape your understanding of what counts as ethnographic knowledge, and what it can do in the world?
Tarryn: This is a great question. The process of writing fiction has absolutely shifted my understanding of what counts as ethnographic knowledge. I feel like fiction freed us up to convey social life more intimately and in more depth than academic formats usually allow. We consciously chose to use an omniscient narrative voice in this book. In other words, we wrote in third person, but with the ability to “know” the thoughts, emotions and past of each of the protagonists. This is a bit uncomfortable for anthropologists because we tend to be really conscious of the politics of representation, cautious about appropriation, and careful to limit our analysis to the ethnographic material we obtained in the field – for example, the words people actually told us and what we actually witnessed, for good reason.
But the ability to walk a mile in another person’s shoes is one of the things I love most about novels. It allowed us to follow the inner worlds of three strangers: Hannah, a young Australian expat who volunteers at a local health organisation while leading a heady life of house parties and weekend getaways; Isikeli, a teenager from the informal settlement who has given up on his childhood dream of playing professional rugby and cares for his diabetic grandmother; and Rishika, an Indo-Fijian historian who put her career on hold when she got married. In writing from these perspectives, we didn’t want to appropriate, but rather to imagineethically and empathetically, making them each as flawed, relatable and endearing as each other. These characterswere inspired by a combination of Eddie’s childhood in Suva as a descendant of Indian indentured labourers, our experiences living, working and raising kids there as adults, and my long-term ethnographic research with Indigenous Fijian (iTaukei) and Indo-Fijian communities around issues of diabetes and poverty.
Juxtaposing the daily lives of characters was ethnographically generative too. It revealed things to us even during the writing process. At the risk of sounding pretentious, we actually found this surprisingly moving at times. For example, the book is set during a tropical cyclone, based heavily on our experience of living in Suva when Tropical Cyclone Winston hit. We were holed up in a hotel with two cabin-fevered young children and felt rather inconvenienced when the electricity went out and they could no longer watch Netflix. We later heard from friends who lived in low-lying villages and informal settlements that they had only narrowly escaped deadly floods. We represented this contrast in the book through the experiences of Hannah (who escaped the cyclone by going to a hotel with her expat friends) and Isikeli (who was forced to take his family to higher ground). It made us understand these positionalities in a new way, at a deeper level.
Fiction also gave us access to spaces that ethnographers often can’t reach: the kinds of violence and abuses of power that are often hidden from public view and don’t tend to be observable by researchers. While a researcher may document what is said and done in public – or in private spaces where they are granted access – fiction can speculate on what happens behind closed doors, in unwitnessed conversations and in people’s unspoken thoughts. In the book Sugar, we did this very consciously with respect to corporate crime. To give some context, I’ve written a few journal articles with colleagues in nutrition and public health about the powerplays of big global beverage companies in thwarting health reforms in developing countries like Fiji. But we’ve been constrained in what we can say – both for legal reasons and in terms of what data we have access to. It’s frustrating because we all know that big corporations strategically withhold data, and a lot of conversations between corporate players and government decisionmakers happen behind closed doors. But in this book, we could write more freely about this – by creating a fictional beverage giant, Island Cola, and writing up some of these elites as characters in the book – to unveil their motivations and highlight the complex but very human, everyday, banal ways in which their profit driven activities result in structural harms for people like Isikeli and his family.
Fiction also encouraged us to explore a deeper kind of reflexivity. There’s a scene in the book where Hannah meets Isikeli by chance just before she’s about to start her first research project, which is about diabetes in the informal settlements . When he tells her that he’s from the settlement – ironically called “Paradise Estate” – and that his grandmother has diabetes, she jumps on the opportunity to interview them. She can barely contain her excitement and she admits to herself that she’s imagining her day in a series of poverty-chic black and white photos that would look good on Instagram. The interaction ends up being rather awkward even from her perspective, where she suddenly realises that the consent forms supposedly written in “plain English” are actually very formal and odd, she doesn’t really know where to sit or how to carry herself. And yet, Isikeli’s grandmother does end up telling her a stirring tale of her life, replete with a discussion of her beliefs about the role of witchcraft in causing diabetes. So, Hannah leaves the interaction feeling nourished, intellectually fascinated and rewarded – the most exciting moment in her career so far. And yet, writing this as fiction allowed us to imagine what this interaction felt like from Isikeli’s perspective. He misunderstood and thought that Hannah was a doctor. He thought she might be able to do something substantive for them, like heal his grandmother more effectively, or organise a wheelchair. But he soon realises it’s only his grandmother’s stories that Hannah wants to collect, and he’s seen it all before, having contributed to many aid, government and university projects. Nothing ever comes of this research for him. We end the scene with Hannah saying a beaming thank you and handing over a $5 Vodafone recharge voucher, for a phone they don’t even have. So, fiction allowed us to reflect on the everyday extractivism of research processes (in which I, for example, have been complicit) in a subtle human-centred way that didn’t villainise Hannah but unveiled her blindness to the system that she benefits from. Over the course of the book, Hannah becomes more aware of her own privilege over time, and we tried to take the reader on the same journey.
Because of the way it orients readers, I do think fiction does different things in the world. Interestingly, we’ve had a lot of former volunteers who spent time in different parts of the Global South say that they’ve felt deeply uncomfortable when they read parts of the book, and it’s made them more aware of how accidentally tone-deaf they were when they first arrived in “the field”, even if they were well intentioned. We’ve also had many Fijians tell us that they have enjoyed reading these moments because it named a power imbalance they have long felt in the development and research space.
Antonio: The narrative brings readers into close proximity with lives shaped by structural inequality without reducing them to analytical examples. How did you navigate the tension between narrative immersion and analytical responsibility?
Tarryn: Most novelists will say their overarching goal is to immerse readers in a story, to make them feel like they have entered a new world and care what happens to the characters. That’s really different from a journal article where authors are expected to overlay or punctuate the narrative with analysis. Even in anthropological articles when we use creative ethnographic snippets, we still tend to slip back into an academic tone afterwards, like an expert telling the reader how to interpret the characters and what happened in those moments. In a novel, that kind of analysis can stick out as a bit didactic and preachy. It immediately wrenches the reader away from the story and takes a bit of the joy out of “reading for pleasure”. There were definitely parts of earlier drafts where we found ourselves slipping into this sort of mode, so we got better at shrugging off our academic conventions over time. The publisher, University of Toronto Press, requested an exegesis chapter at the end, so we did include our rationale and analysis at the end of the book, in case readers wanted that context afterwards. Some readers have told us they liked this, while others said they ignored it or didn’t like the change in tone.
Another way we tried to encourage immersion is by using the genre of a murder mystery. A whodunnit makes a story more compelling, like a page-turner. This was important to me as a teacher. I’ve noticed students don’t read as much anymore so this was a way I thought we could capture and maintain their interest. I think many students, especially at La Trobe University where we have a lot of “first in family” and ethnically and linguistically diverse students, academic work is intimidating. They think that there is a right and wrong way to read, which is quite prohibitive. I thought that if we could immerse them more fully in the narrative, and make them laugh and cry or feel scared along with the characters, they might resonate with the critical social theory at a deeper level and feel more empowered to talk about what they took away from the book.
Antonio: In your work, everyday experiences – care, aspiration, fatigue, obligation – seem to carry broader historical and political weight. How did you approach rendering these ordinary moments as sites of ethnographic insight?
Tarryn: In some ways, fiction does this naturally. Writing about the everyday experiences of three different characters (each of whom have very different opportunities and different relationships to Fiji’s past) automatically shines a political and historical light on their stories. Of course, we played with this a bit too – we made Rishika a historian who was researching her family history of indentured labour, and this narrative device allowed us to historicise her life in a character-driven way.
The politics of aspiration is an interesting question. One of the events that prompted us to write the book, as we explain in the explanatory chapter, was when our rental flat in Suva was burgled one night in 2017. Almost everyone we spoke to – Indo-Fijians, expats and iTaukei alike – assumed the culprits were young iTaukei men from the nearby informal settlement. Some told us it was “probably the coconut boys,” which is the young men who sold coconuts by the roadside nearby. It was like these guys were the “usual suspects,” blamed whenever there was crime, violence, vandalism or social disorder. But at the same time, in both of our lines of work we were increasingly aware of bigger structural harms in which corporations were knowingly marketing and selling deadly products to consumers, and local governments seemed powerless to stop them. In contrast to petty crime, these sources of social harm were just considered an ordinary aspect of “development” and hardly ever questioned. So to make readers feel unsettled about this, we needed to carefully craft the character of Isikeli, and imagine why he was turning to petty crime. We gave him a backstory. That he was actually an incredibly proud iTaukei teenager and Christian and that he was amazing at rugby and had these dreams of playing professionally. And yet he was caught up in extremely challenging economic circumstances, had very few work prospects, and needed money to help care for his niece, and his grandmother, Bu, who had recently suffered from an amputation from diabetes. So, fiction enabled us to imagine the kind of person who might have burgled our house that night, and rather than blame them as inherently criminal or immoral, show instead that they too have everyday experiences, families, romantic lives, hopes and fears – just like any other character in Suva. It also helped us to show the historical and political forces that set the conditions for their choices on that evening.
Antonio: Writing collaboratively across genres is itself a methodological choice. How did your collaboration shape the voice, structure, and ethical commitments of the book?
Tarryn: It was such a steep and fascinating learning curve writing this book together. We needed to arrive at the voice of each of our different characters, some of whom were composites of ourselves or people very familiar to us, while others were more distant. We had constant explicit conversations about the politics of representation, to do with gender, race, class and sexuality. As an anthropologist – with all of my white guilt and ill-confidence about the reflexive turn – I agonised a lot over this. Eddie, on the other hand, was far more certain. For him, as long as it was true to Fiji, and as long as it captured the characters fairly, empathetically and accurately, then we could write it. This reminds me of Sophie’ Chao’s article in American Ethnologist “To Write or not to Write: Towards a hesitant anthropology” She argues thatwriting can give voice to marginalized perspectives but also risks misrepresenting or exploiting them, and that ethnographers need to navigate this tension thoughtfully. She explains that sometimes choosing not to write, or to write differently (such as through fiction) can be an ethical and political choice. Even still, fiction is a powerful tool that needs to be wielded with care.
There were other possibilities opened up by co-authoring. Essentially, Eddie and I wrote about the ongoing impacts of colonisation, and the blunt fact of the matter is that my people colonised his people. So, there was a kind of reckoning we needed to do with that history that occurred during the writing process. Of course, we’re not the only ones to be doing this. There is a particular moment right now in which this kind of co-authoring is increasingly common. In fact, a couple of years ago, we were invited to a Writers’ festival panel about co-authoring alongside Australian Indigenous scholar, Bruce Pascoe and his former partner Lyn Harwood, who wrote the book Black Duck together, and Kerry O’Brien and Thomas Mayo, who wrote the Voice to Parliament Handbook. What all of these collaborations had in common is that they demanded a deep attentiveness to power, voice, and responsibility. And what came out of this panel was that co-authoring across cultural and historical difference wasn’t just about merging two writing styles or sets of ideas. It was about ongoing negotiation and, often, discomfort. For Eddie and I, that meant talking openly about our positions, and acknowledging that the act of writing together was shaped by a colonial history that isn’t over.
Our co-authoring conversations also played out in unpredictable ways. For example, Hannah and her friends were, perhaps unsurprisingly, based very much on my experiences. But it was actually Eddie in earlier drafts that felt that we had been a bit harsh on Hannah and her expat friends and made them almost a caricature at times. And so it was him who made them much more subtle, more human and relatable – alongside their evident flaws – over the course of writing and rewriting drafts.
Another thing I have appreciated about co-authoring is that writing is often quite a lonely, anxious process, and releasing a novel is a very scary prospect. Co-authoring has the added benefit of being more collaborative and less isolating. You have someone to share your worries with, share your disappointments with, and share the achievements with.
Antonio: This work invites engagement beyond academic audiences while remaining deeply grounded in ethnographic practice. What role do you see such experimental forms playing in the future of public anthropology?
Tarryn: I definitely think that experimental forms – especially collaborative ones – are crucial to the future of public anthropology. They resonate with audiences in different ways. (And it’s not just novels. Some of my favourite anthropologists are experimenting with different modes of ethnographic fiction and creative non-fiction (Catie Gressier, Yasmine Musharbash, Casey Golomski, Leslie Carlin), poetry (Catherine Trundle, Susan Wardell), and photography exhibitions (Simon Coleman, Lewis Johnstone)!)
In terms of how they resonate differently, the novel has a public afterlife beyond its authors. Random members of the public write reviews about the book on Good Reads and communicate with each other about it on forums. The media write about it and talk about ethnography on TV and radio. Curious doctors contact you and ask for more anthropology articles. It has been an incredible experience, watching others’ engagement with what anthropology is and what its insights can offer.
Reactions to Sugar have been a bit surprising to Eddie and me. It was always important that we didn’t make the characters emblematic of race. Each of the three main communities in the book – IndoFijians, iTaukei and expats – are represented by heroes, fools and rogues. In writing all of these characters, we were critical of contemporary Suva in many ways. We kind of tip-toed in when we released the book there amongst friends, family, colleagues and strangers. But Fiji embraced the book wholeheartedly. What was really striking to us was the ways in which people’s affinities with different characters did not necessarily cohere along racialised lines. For example, some Indo-Fijian women told us that they thought they were going to identify most with Rishika, but it was actually Hannah and her awkward interactions at work and highly gendered expat community that resonated with them most. Likewise, one iTaukei friend who grew up in the informal settlements said that he found the depictions of Isikeli’s challenges very moving, but that he actually mostly identified with the character of Ethan – an Australian volunteer who is a very sharp critic, and is always quite irritable with the do-gooders in the development space. Quite a few Australian and American women have told us that it is Rishika who they grieve with at the end of the novel. They identify with the challenges of navigating relationships and careers, and the grief of losing a partner. So, it was a poignant reminder that creative artforms allow people to identify with different elements of the human experience, beyond the more obvious identity markers that seem to be so polarising right now.
I’m excited to keep watching how experimental anthropology develops and expands. And it’s really wonderful that we have platforms like The Public Anthropologist who support this kind of work.
