This issue of categorisation is a recurring theme in the eleven essays and one interview that constitute A Companion to the Works of Kim Scott. Scholars from Australia, North America, and India explore Scott's writing within and across the frames of Australian Aboriginal literature, Australian literature and world literature. Australian-born Belinda Wheeler, now an academic at Claflin University in South Carolina, previously edited A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature (2013). In compiling this latest book, she signals the importance of Scott's writing, teaching and community work.

Opening with Per Henningsgaard's overview of Scott's diverse publishing history, it then tracks through each of his major publications, outlines his impressive contribution to Curtin University's Indigenous Health unit, and concludes with Scott's own voice. All of Scott's work is interconnected in deep, enriching ways. The best essays in this collection look beyond their chosen text to illuminate how those connections operate, and why they are so crucial for us to understand. Natalie Quinlivan's entry on the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project, its importance, how it functions, and where it might be positioned in its regional, national, and global politics and readership, is particularly insightful.

Scott is probably best known to general readers as a novelist. Both Benang and That Deadman Dance (2010) are Miles Franklin Literary Award winners. It is pleasing, therefore, to see two separate chapters dedicated to his short stories. Lydia Saleh Rofail identifies ancestral trauma and spectral landscapes in 'A Refreshing Sleep', 'Capture', and 'An Intimate Act'. From a very different perspective, Nathanael Pree demonstrates how Scott employs the mode of ekphrasis in five other stories. Having argued that Scott's 'Into the Light' is an 'imagist response' to Hans Heysen's iconic Droving into the Light, Pree concludes that 'Scott's ekphrasis embodies the concept of indigenous storytelling as a mode of tone and rhythm in relation to the landscape'.

For me, the highlight of this Companion is Tony Hughes-d'Aeth's nuanced, close readings of Scott's poetry. Hughes-d'Aeth is attuned to the subtlety and complexity of Scott's writing and cultural work, and he writes in accessible, flowing prose. At one point he sets up a conversation between the poem 'Wangelanginy' (2002), That Deadman Dance, and the story Mamang (2011), concluding: 'What Wangelanginy helps readers see is the genesis of the story within the imagination of Scott and its particular role as a generative internalized myth that speaks directly to the actuality of his writing projects.'

Kim Scott (photograph by Gnangarra, Wikmedia Commons)As a Noongar man, writer, and scholar, Scott considers his most important readership to be members of his Noongar mob. He also knows that there are few readers of his work among them. In the concluding interview, Wheeler points out that the library database WorldCat records that over sixty per cent of library holdings of That Deadman Dance are in America. She lists figures around the fifty per cent mark for Benang, Kayang and Me (2013), and True Country (1993). Given the difference in market size, I fail to get excited by such statistics. More productively, Gillian Whitlock and Roger Osborne trace the international reception of Scott's work through a case study of Benang. They are interested in the transnational turn in literary studies and they acknowledge rightly that there is an ever-expanding interest in, and awareness of, the 'significance and distinctiveness of Australian studies and Australian literary studies in the northern hemisphere'. This Companion feeds into that growing interest and, more broadly, into the field of transnational studies.

Wheeler understandably asserts that the Companion's essays are 'the best essays to date on Scott by leading scholars from around the world'. It is a big claim and, in my opinion, not entirely correct, but I welcome this book's publication. It will be a vital resource for scholars. And it affirms the value of Scott's work on a regional, national, and international scale. This is a book more geared towards an academic rather than a general readership. A number of contributions have risen out of specific academic conferences and thus have been shaped by current trends in (Australian) literary studies. Price is also a prohibitive factor. This Companion, and recently Anne Brewster's Giving This Country a Memory (2015), are significant books for advancing (largely non-indigenous) readers' understanding and appreciation of Aboriginal Australian writing. Both books are produced by American publishers primarily for world libraries. It is imperative that academics around the English-speaking world, at the very least, order these books for their institutional libraries.

In the Foreword to this Companion, Wiradjuri writer and scholar Jeanine Leane writes that she is privileged to be invited to step into Noongar country. With this invitation, she notes, 'comes the responsibility of being a respectful visitor who takes the time to be introduced to this history and story of place'. A Companion to the Works of Kim Scott goes some way to giving readers just such an introduction.