Ronnie Scott is an RMIT academic and co-founder of the literary journal The Lifted Brow. His debut novel, The Adversary (2020), set mainly in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, was a wry exploration of the nuances of house sharing and online dating.
His second novel, Shirley, is also set in Melbourne’s inner-northern suburbs. Unlike the house in Abbotsford that gives the novel its title, the female narrator is nameless. As a child, she was abandoned by her food-celebrity mother after a controversial incident, left in the eponymous family house in the care of a series of business managers named “Gerald”. She has grown into a lonely adult, who still yearns to be seen by her mother.
