More Information
When the acclaimed author Cory Taylor was diagnosed with a terminal illness, what followed was an astonishing creative surge that resulted in a memoir Barack Obama named as one of his favourite books of 2017.
Equally moving and disarmingly funny, Taylor’s last work has been adapted with great care by writer and broadcaster Benjamin Law (Torch the Place), a family friend of Taylor’s, who brings a loving ear to this most intimate tale.
Taylor’s wry insights into the rituals, language and taboos surrounding mortality can be witty, provocative or eye-opening – sometimes in the same breath. With honesty and unsentimental clarity she confronts the swamp of anxiety and despair that traditionally surrounds death and opens the door to the bright clear-eyed vision it ultimately grants us. Learning to face death is, in the end, learning to live fully.
Cory Taylor was born in Queensland in 1955. She was an award-winning novelist and screenwriter who also published short fiction and children’s books. Her first novel, Me and Mr Booker, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Pacific Region) in 2012 and her second novel, My Beautiful Enemy, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2014. She died on 5 July 2016, a couple of months after Dying: A Memoir was published.
Benjamin Law is a writer whose work spans nonfiction, screenplays, journalism, stage plays, documentaries and essays. His debut play Torch the Place was staged by Melbourne Theatre Company and will be restaged by Queensland Theatre in 2026. He is the bestselling author of The Family Law, which was shortlisted for Book of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards and adapted into three seasons of the award-winning SBS TV series of the same name, for which Benjamin was creator, associate producer and screenwriter. He is also the author of Gaysia: Adventures in the Queer East, the Quarterly Essay Moral Panic 101 and editor of Growing Up Queer in Australia. As a screenwriter, Benjamin won an Australian Writers’ Guild Award for his work on the SBS drama New Gold Mountain, and worked as co-executive producer, co-creator and co-writer of the Netflix series Wellmania (2023).
