A new girl in town seeks the realisation of her fantasies, and finds the unexpected. A brother and a sister embark on a journey in search of their estranged brother. An acquaintance comes to stay and old habits are quickly resumed … No one in these stories has solid ground under their feet. Linked by coincidence and desire, by death and geography, they struggle towards futures where nothing in certain — learning to live without expectation but not without hope. Originally published in 1994 as Suck My Toes, Dirt is short fiction at its finest: polished, witty, and explosive. It won the Steele Rudd Award for an Australian short-story collection, cementing Fiona McGregor’s reputation as one of our most exciting writers.
Marie King is 59, recently divorced and her children have moved out. On a drunken whim she gets a tattoo, an act that gives way to an unexpected friendship with her tattoo artist, Rhys. Before long Rhys introduces Marie to a side of her city she has never seen before.
Searching for solitude and a space to re-create herself away from her large Sydney family, a twenty-one-year-old woman embraces the anonymous pleasures of a foreign language and city. In doing so she launches herself into the madness of a wealthy Parisian household — and while she expects to be treated as an equal, she comes to realise she is little more than a servant. In this, her first novel, Fiona McGregor has given us a funny and occasionally painful account of the search for identity and the pressures of family and place which shape us.
The long awaited second novel from Fiona McGregor, which charts the dance parties, relationships and creative endeavours of a group of friends in Sydney.
Who is Iris Webber? A thief, a fighter, a wife, a lover. A scammer, a schemer, a friend. A musician, a worker, a big-hearted fool. A woman who has prevailed against the toughest gangsters of the day, defying police time and again, yet is now trapped in a prison cell. Guilty or innocent? Rollicking through the underbelly of 1930s sly-grog Sydney, Iris is a dazzling literary achievement from one of Australia's finest writers. Based on actual events and set in an era of cataclysmic change, here is a fierce, fascinating tale of a woman who couldn't be held back. SHORTLISTED FOR THE MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD 2023 SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 NSW PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARDS CHRISTINA STEAD PRIZE FOR FICTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE ALS GOLD MEDAL 2023 SHORTLISTED FOR THE ARA HISTORICAL NOVEL PRIZE ADULT CATEGORY 2023 LONGLISTED FOR THE STELLA PRIZE 2023 LONGLISTED FOR THE ABDA BOOK DESIGN AWARDS 2023 BEST DESIGNED LITERARY FICTION COVER LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKPEOPLE ADULT FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 PRAISE FOR IRIS 'The story of Iris had to be told, and Fiona Kelly McGregor has produced the roughest but most invaluable diamond.' Tony Birch 'There's a magical conjuring up here, a dream-building of people, place and things. Iris is to me not just a great urban novel, but maybe the best Australian city novel ever.' Peter Doyle 'Visceral and immediate and relevant. It's a stunner.' Hannah Kent 'A vivid, arresting voice ... Utterly gripping. Love it.' Lucy Treloar 'A brawling, picaresque book by one of our foremost cartographers of settler Sydney.' Declan Fry, The Sydney Morning Herald 'Vivid and panoramic.' The Times / The Conversation 'Intimate and exuberant.' Gemma Nisbet, The West Australian 'Exceptional ... This book had me in its clutches for an unusually long time. I didn't want to let it - or Iris - go.' Alison Huber, Readings Bookshop 'An exhilarating squeezebox of a novel.' Felicity Plunkett, The Australian Book Review 'McGregor's Iris is a bold example of literary craft that demonstrates a profound historical understanding of place and time. The experience of Iris - a woman defiant in the face of injustice, and fierce, despite hardship - in a time of economic pain, social uncertainty, and looming war, remains starkly relevant today.' Stella Prize Judges 'Iris's charisma is a constant presence across the novel, carried almost entirely by her distinctive voice, the most striking and compelling feature of this work.' Fiona Wright
The dictum goes: Go to the bars of a place to understand its living. Go to the museums to understand its dead. When Fiona McGregor, writer and performance artist, travelled to Poland in 2006 as a festival participant, it was her first visit to Eastern Europe. She had a remarkable vantage point to observe new formations in old Europe: economic, political, and personal. Fiona gets caught up watching and participating in a culture in change, where people are struggling to live well enough under capitalism and where old ideas are expressed in the extraordinary cluster of public museums she found. This is a travelogue of Poland from street level.
Novelist Fiona McGregor'snew book, Buried Not Dead, is a collection of essays on art, literature and performance, sexuality, activism and the life of the city. It features performance artists, writers, dancers, tattooists and DJs, some of them famous, like Marina Abramović and Mike Parr, while others, like Latai Taumoepeau, Lanny K and Kathleen Mary Fallon, are important figures but less well known. In her portraits of these performers and artists and the scenes they inhabit, McGregor creates an intimate and expansive archive of a kind rarely recorded in our histories. Fiona McGregor has a deep and enduring involvement in the worlds she represents. She came of age as an artist during an outpouring of performative queer creativity, in a community that celebrated subversion, dissent and uninhibited partygoing, and in her writing she observes the shift from that moment to new forms of cultural repression. McGregor is a participant in her essays as well as a witness — she sees through an artist's eyes and records what she perceives with a novelist's insight. In excavating the lives of others, she reveals her own, and shows the possibilities that exist beneath the surface of our culture. 'Compromise-averse, dangerous, this book is also a precious archive of radical art-making witnessed firsthand.' — Maria Tumarkin 'MacGregor has a fine eye for the moment, in a text or performance, when the marvellous happens. Cutting across the boring divides between high art and low dives, Buried Not Dead is alive to what's alive.' — McKenzie Wark 'In a world that bludgeons you into numbness Buried Not Dead will startle you back to life. McGregor's book is a shriek of rage and a cry of pleasure, and sometimes it is hard to tell one from the other.' — Krissy Kneen
Haunted Voices -- a bold and ambitious anthology in both text and audio -- showcases some of Scotland's best oral storytellers, from archived stories of past masters to the work of contemporary performers, and their most disturbing tales of terror.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.