A Real Piece of Work

An exhilarating, thought-provoking and joyful debut that asks how we create our identities and how we can transcend them.

'Language gave to me the body I knew was mine and brought into existence so many possibilities for what my gender can be.'

Across these twenty fresh and boldly intimate stories, Erin Riley writes about the things that matter most- family, heartbreak, humanity, justice and swimming, and the messy, hard graft of becoming one's authentic self.

In weaving together their everyday while questioning society and its structures, Erin gifts us stories that double as a manifesto on how to disrupt and reinvent narrative, identity, love and community.

Life is complicated, messy and - when small risks are taken - even exhilarating. In Erin's hands we fall in love, get curious and become exasperated with (and sometimes charmed by) the people in their life, emerging with new perspectives on how to be in the world.

Social worker and counsellor Erin Riley is a recipient of Penguin Random House Australia's 2021 Write It fellowship program, which aspires to find, nurture and develop unpublished writers across all genres, with a focus on underrepresented sections of our community.

About the Author

By day, Erin Riley is a social worker, having spent most of the last decade working alongside marginalised populations in community aged care in and around Sydney. By night, Erin's a skivvy-wearer, a dedicated reader, wrestling fan, swimmer of laps and a lover of routine. Erin brings a queer lived experience to their professional work and to their writing, and is fascinated and energised by the power of stories in both understanding and reimagining ourselves. They were a Penguin Random House Australia Write It fellow in 2021, and have been published in Kill Your Darlings, Bent Street and various corners of the internet. Erin lives in Sydney with their partner and Remy the dog.