Gold Digger Sydney Launch: Better Read than Dead

Name: Gold Digger Sydney Launch: Better Read than Dead
Start: 2025-09-27T08:00:00+10:00
End: 2025-09-27T09:30:00+10:00
Location: Better Read Than Dead

Schedule

Sat Sep 27 2025 at 08:00 am to 09:30 am

UTC+10:00

Location

Better Read Than Dead | Alexandria, NS

Gazebo Books and Better Read than Dead Books present the launch of Gold Digger by Lisa Collyer. Launched by Dr Willo Drummond, mceed by Magdalena Ball, and with readings from Magdalena Ball, Willo Drummond, and Elizabeth Walton.
Synopsis:
Gold Digger challenges the enduring myths of domesticity by portraying women as breadwinners, unearthing the realities of labour, aspiration, and social mobility. Collyer deftly reveals how women's work - often overlooked or undervalued - has always been present, from the kitchen to the corridors of power. Motifs of unfair play and erasure echo throughout, reaching even the highest tiers of government, including Parliament House.
The collection features The Grape Picker[s], shortlisted for the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize (2025).
Tickets:
https://www.betterreadevents.com/events/gold-digger-lisa-collyer-with-willo-drummond-and-magdalena-ball

Lisa Collyer is a writer in Boorloo (Perth). She is the author of the poetry collection, How To Order Eggs Sunny Side Up (2023) (short-listed for The Dorothy Hewett Award), published with Life Before Man Books. Her personal essay, ‘Prolonged Exposure’ was published in the anthology, Women of a Certain Courage (2025) with Fremantle Press. Her poem, ‘The Grape Pickers’ was short-listed for the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize (2025). She recently won an artist residence at Bundanon Art Museum (2025) where she will create new work on climate grief. Her second poetry collection, Gold Digger will be published in September 2025.
Willo Drummond is a Blue Mountains based poet and lecturer in creative writing. Her debut poetry collection Moon Wrasse (Puncher & Wattmann), was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in the 2024 NSW Premier's Literary Awards, commended in the 2023 Five Islands Poetry Prize for a First Book of Poetry and selected as one of 6 Australian poetry titles to feature in the 2024 Aesop Queer Library. Willo's poetry has appeared in Best of Australian Poems, been shortlisted for the Val Vallis Award, the ACU Prize for Poetry, the South Coast Writers Centre Poetry Award, runner-up in the Tom Collins Poetry Prize and longlisted for the Liquid Amber Poetry Prize and the Grieve Writing Awards. In 2023-24 she coedited, with poet Stuart Barnes, 'Queering Ecopoet(h)ics', a queer themed issue of Plumwood Mountain Journal.
Magdalena Ball is a novelist, poet, reviewer, interviewer, Vice President of Flying Island, and managing editor of Compulsive Reader. Her work has appeared in an extensive list of journals and anthologies, and has won or shortlisted in many local and international awards, including the Melbourne Poets Union International Poetry Competition, the SCWC Poetry Award, the Liquid Amber Press poetry prize, the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor's international poetry prize, and the Woollahra Digital Literary Award, as well as shortlisting for a Red Room Poetry Fellowship. She is the author of several novels and poetry books, most recently, Bobish, a verse-memoir published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2023.
Elizabeth Walton is a writer and a musician whose work concentrates on environmental and social justice. She has been listed in many national literature awards including the Tom Collins and June Shenfield poetry prizes. A finalist in the Furphy and Woollahra Digital Literary Awards, the AAWPandRos Spencer poetry prizes, Elizabeth has recently been in residency at the Wollongong
Botanic Gardens and Bundanon. She recently completed her Masters of Creative Writing with a Macquarie University Award for Academic Excellence and is now completing her PhD.