Fiona Kelly McGregor is a multidisciplinary writer, artist and critic whose latest novel Iris (2022) is based on the life of petty criminal and busker Iris Webber, and set in 1932-37 inner Sydney slums. Epic and picaresque, a star-crossed love story, Iris is a teeming social portrait of schemers, gamblers, goodtime girls, gangsters and sly-groggers. It was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, the NSW Premier’s Award, the ALS Gold Medal, the ARA Historical Novel Prize, the Voss Literary Prize, and longlisted for the Stella Prize, the BookPeople and ABDA Awards.
Buried not dead (2021), is an essay collection spanning almost three decades of McGregor’s writing on art, literature and performance, sexuality, activism and the life of the city. It was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
McGregor’s previous novel Indelible Ink (2010), winner of Age Book of the Year and multiple short-listee, is another great novel of the city. Set in Sydney at the end of the Howard era, during the millennium drought, Indelible Ink revolves around family, friendship, death, love, tattoos, the body and transfiguration.
Strange Museums, a travel memoir of a performance art tour through Poland, was published to critical acclaim in 2008. Suck My Toes (1994), an interlinked collection of short stories, won a QLD literary award (Steele Rudd) and was re-issued as Dirt in e-book format in 2013.
More information about these titles can be found on this website under WORDS. Photo documentation of a portion of McGregor’s repertoire of performance art dating from the late 1990s to 2020, can be found under ACTIONS. Under WRITING ONLINE is an extensive list of links to McGregor’s essays, critiques and reviews.