Mandy Sayer

Shortlisted, The Age Book of the Year Award 2023, Non-fiction The trailblazing McDonagh sisters were the first women in Australia to form their own film production company. Between 1926 and 1933, while they were in their mid-twenties, these sassy sisters produced four feature films and a number of documentaries. The youngest, Paulette, was one of only five women film directors...

Since the arrival of the First Fleet, there have been Gypsies in Australia, yet their experiences have never been included in any official histories. In Australian Gypsies, award-winning memoirist and novelist Mandy Sayer weaves together a vivid, wide-ranging history that begins with the roots of the Romani culture. She traces the first Gypsy people to arrive in Australia, including James...

I fell in love with my first misfit at the age of three. He was a disabled man in a wheelchair who sold newspapers every afternoon outside the Empire Hotel in Annandale. Whenever I glimpsed him in the distance I would break into a run, jump onto his lap, and smother him with kisses. Misfits & Me represents a selection...

'... the sky detonated into chandeliers of light, and the Harbour Bridge was illuminated with Eternity, but the dawning of the new millennium was for me an anticlimax. Nothing had really changed; you were still dying, and no amount of pretty, sequined light floating from the heavens was going to reverse your fate.' When Mandy Sayer learns of her father...