We are delighted to share that The Speechwriterby Martin McKenzie-Murray has won the biennial Russell Prize for Humour Writing.
11 May, 2023
The Speechwriter awarded 2023 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).
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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 uninvited literary opinions of his murderous cellmate, Garry.
What Toby unspools is a tale of twisted bureaucracy, public servants gone rogue, and the ever-present pervasive stench of rotting prawns (don’t ask). Realising that his political career is far from the noble endeavour he’d once imagined it would be, Toby makes a bid for freedom … before the terrible realisation dawns: it's impossible to get fired from the public service. Refusing to give up (or have to pay for his relocation fee), Toby’s attempts to get fired grow more and more extreme, and he finds himself being propelled higher and higher through the ranks of bureaucracy.
