PRIZES to win! PROMOTIONS
John Morrissey is a Melbourne writer of Kalkadoon descent. He was the winner of the 2020 Indigenous Writers Mentorship and runner-up for the Nakata Brophy Prize in 2018. John’s debut Firelight won an Aurealis Award and a Queensland Literary Award, and in 2024 he was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist. Bird Deity is his first novel.
'Bird Deity is a spare and moving story about the burden of history and the vicissitudes of the colonial project. Morrissey's novel has a dignified, undeniable power. It's like Coetzee in space. I devoured it.’ * Dominic Amerena * ‘Here is a sharp and compelling new voice in Australian fiction...I read Firelight breathlessly.’ * Jennifer Down on Firelight * ‘Firelight introduces us to a young writer with a dedication to the craft of short fiction. Each of John Morrissey’s stories is a gem, while the collection as a whole is superb.’ * Tony Birch on Firelight * ‘An exemplary collection...Engages with both a sense of wonderment and our innate capacity for compassion, wonderful and abstracted at turns, often simultaneously.’ * Australian Book Review on Firelight *
