Mandy Sayer is an award-winning novelist and non-fiction writer. As the daughter of a musician, she spent her childhood and adolescence living a nomadic existence in Australia and America. Sayer’s work has been published in the US, UK, Germany, Brazil, Japan and China. She lives in Sydney with her husband, author and playwright, Louis Nowra.
September 2025
No Dancing in the Lift: A Memoir
No Dancing in the Lift
A Memoir
“Mandy Sayer’s storytelling is unforgettable music”
—Maxine Hong Kingston, Author of Woman Warrior
When Mandy Sayer learns of her father Gerry’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, she faces a reckoning with past and future as she learns to navigate a precarious present. This is the joyous and nuanced account of her father’s later life, his illness and the beautiful moments, music and memories of earlier times they share, yet it is also a fearless exploration of inescapable grief.
And an unfurling story of new love. Most of us will face the death of a cherished parent, and we all know the euphoria of falling in love. But few of us will experience both at the same time. Mandy’s clear-eyed memoir is an unforgettable love letter from a daughter to her father and a wife to her husband.
No Dancing in the Lift is rich in intimate anecdotes begging to be shared. Evocative, funny, uplifting and heartbreaking, Mandy Sayer writes with a vivacious and lyrical grace.
November 2021
Those Dashing McDonagh Sisters: Australia’s first female filmmaking team.
Those Dashing McDonagh Sisters
Australia’s first female filmmaking team
“Gossipy, fascinating, and totally entertaining, a FABULOUS read, absolutely adored it.”
—Jacki Weaver
The trailblazing McDonagh sisters were the first women in Australia to form their own film production company. Between 1926 and 1933, while they were in their mid-twenties, these sassy sisters produced four feature films and a number of documentaries. The youngest, Paulette, was at the time one of only five women film directors in the world. Phyllis produced, art directed and conducted publicity. And the eldest, Isabel, under her stage name Marie Lorraine, acted superbly in all the female leads.
Together, the sisters transformed Australian cinema’s preoccupations with the outback and the bush – and what they mocked as ‘haystack movies’ – into a thrilling, urban modernity. Their personal lives were just as adventurous, and their suitors included an internationally famous magician, a wealthy rubber broker, a defrocked Anglican priest, and a number of silent film stars.
In Those Dashing McDonagh Sisters, Mandy Sayer narrates the sisters’ remarkable story, from daughters of a respected Sydney surgeon with a love of theatre and the arts, to their first feature film, Those Who Love (1926), an instant hit, to their controversial final film, Two Minutes Silence (1933). Today, their most famous feature, The Cheaters, is frequently screened at international film festivals around the world, most notably in New York and London, to rapturous reviews.