Shirley Marr
Shirley Marr is a CBCA Book of the Year winning childrens' author and a first generation Chinese-Australian living in sunny Perth. Her titles are Fury, Preloved, Little Jiang, Glasshouse of Stars and All Four Quarters of the Moon.
It was while she was working on a very dry Accounting PhD that she realised she’d rather be writing down her dark, twisted daydreams instead. She is still a Bespectacled Accountant by day and a Masked Writer at night.
Shirley describes herself as having a Western Mind and an Eastern Heart and writes in the middle where both collide. She takes milk and sugar with her tea much to the dismay of her oolong drinking friends and eats chicken feet much to the disgust of her Aussie friends. Her passion is to distil her cultural heritage in dark and unusual ways through the lens of resilient young women.
She is the only person she knows who has ever been kicked out of a bookstore for disruptive behaviour.
She is represented by Gemma Cooper from The Bent Agency
#ownvoices #asianvoices #chinesevoices
“If you're hoping to party like it's 1999 because Prince told you the world was going to end in 2000, then I'm sorry to disappoint you. We're still here.”
“I grabbed Lexi’s tousled head and kissed her hair. She smelt like John-Paul Gaultier and blood.”
“You don’t give your mum enough credit for raising you, Elle. Look at you. Teenage sweetheart with a sugar shell and strychnine centre. We might as well finish speaking the truth now.”
“My uniform felt like a costume. I put on a fresh coat of black nail polish. I twisted up a tube of Revlon Red and put my war paint on. I sharpened the tips of my Fierce Words so they were like a row of shiny arrows.”
“Brian, maybe you are right after all. It was a plan. It had a beginning, middle and an end. We knew what we wanted to do, what we were going to do, and how to do it. We never meant for it to turn out this way, but you’re right. It was a plan. We got up off the floor and for the first time in two weeks, and we put our school uniforms on.”
“I was thinking that if it really was my fault, if every reaction could be traced to an action before, then at the very beginning would be me at the canteen queue with my twenty-dollar note instead of my packed lunch. In turn I could blame my mother for not caring enough and maybe I could blame my father for making my mum stop caring. Maybe all this was supposed to happen. It had been happening all along. It was too hard to try and stop it now. In a twisted way, there was cold comfort in that.”
“So it is just you and your friends then.” “Yes. Is that so hard to believe?” Is it because we’re girls? I want to say. You think a bunch of girls are not capable of something like this?”
“I walked up to the window, raised my palm and pressed it against the pane. It left a bloodied handprint. Through the red shape—my red flag, my riot sign—I could see Neil staring at me.”
“What the hell. Was he going to bring out a gramophone or Morse code machine too?”
“I swapped my heart for a bargaining chip a long time ago. And here I am turning it over and over again in my hand, not sure what to trade it in for.”