Asphyxia

Asphyxia is the mononymous professional identity of a Deaf Australian author, illustrator, artist, activist, and public speaker. Her creative practice has also included circus performance, puppetry, art journaling, and accessible music. She became Deaf at age three and learned to sign at eighteen. In describing that transition, she connects language and the Deaf community with belonging, friendship, cultural identity, and a confidence she did not have while growing up in hearing settings.

Her illustrated young adult novel appeared in Australia as Future Girl and in North America as The Words in My Hands. Presented as Deaf teenager Piper's art journal, it brings together Deaf identity, Auslan, family and social barriers with a near-future crisis shaped by food insecurity, fuel scarcity, political control, and environmental strain. Asphyxia has said she wrote the story to offer the authentic Deaf representation she rarely encountered and to show how community, food growing, and practical resilience can answer crisis without reducing survival to isolation.

Asphyxia created the words and images together, using techniques developed through years of art journaling. She rewrote the book from scratch five times. Her account of revision describes first getting the story down, then returning to emotions, scenes, and visual expression rather than forcing a fixed design before the narrative was ready. She also examined the cumulative effect of everyday audist microaggressions and translated that reflection into Piper's difficulty naming and resisting exclusion.

Before Future Girl, Asphyxia developed The Grimstones, a family of gothic puppets made from discarded materials. The project toured as a puppet show in Australia and internationally for five years before Allen & Unwin published it as an illustrated children's series. That movement between performance, crafted objects, text, photography, and illustration anticipates the mixed visual and written form of her later novel.

The novel won the 2021 Readings Young Adult Book Prize under the title Future Girl and the 2022 Schneider Family Book Award for teens under the title The Words in My Hands. Kirkus selected the North American edition for its Best Books of 2021 list. Asphyxia later told The Daily Moth that Orange Entertainment Co. was developing a television version, while emphasizing that it was still at an early writing stage rather than a completed or released adaptation.