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AUTHOR
Martin McKenzie-Murray
Martin McKenzie-Murray was The Saturday Paper’s chief correspondent,…
DiscoverThe Speechwriter awarded 2023 Russell Prize for Humour Writing
We are delighted to share that The Speechwriter by Martin McKenzie-Murray has won the biennial Russell Prize for Humour Writing.
The judges of the award — Wendy Harmer, Rawah Arjah, and Alistair Baldwin — praised the book’s wordplay and inventiveness, commenting to, ‘Forget every satirical political memoir you have ever read. The Speechwriter is here to re-invent the genre in a time where politics comes to us in fractals of the unreliable, shameless, self-serving, deluded and absurd.’
To further celebrate the book, McKenzie-Murray will be appearing in conversation with judge Wendy Harmer at a free event at Sydney Writers’ Festival on Friday 26 (more information here).
The Speechwriter
In his fiction debut, erstwhile speechwriter Martin McKenzie-Murray takes us on a frantic, funny, and surreal journey through the corridors of power.
Toby, former speechwriter to the PM, has reached a new low: locked behind bars in a high-security prison, with sentient PlayStations storming the city outside, and the worst of Australia’s criminals forcing him to ghost-write letters to their loved ones or have his spine repurposed as a coat-rack. How did he get here? From the vantage point of his prison cell, Toby pens his memoir, trying to piece together how he fell so far, all the while fielding the…
