Christos Tsiolkas

‘Patrick White, the un-Australian writer who did more than any other writer in the twentieth century to create an imaginative language that we can call Australian, who unshackled us from the demand that we write as the English do, who recognised, through his own alienation and also through his profound love for his partner, that we were a migrant and mongrel nation forging our own culture and our own language.’

Misfits & Me represents a selection of Mandy Sayer’s non-fiction writing from the past twenty years. Each essay has been chosen to reflect a different aspect of Mandy’s attraction to Australia’s misfits and outsiders, from child gangs and hoarders to pensioner drug dealers. Sayer also writes with her inimitable frankness about her unconventional family, her unusual marriage to playwright and author Louis Nowra, and her writing process.