Buried Not Dead

Novelist Fiona McGregor’s new book, Buried Not Dead, is a collection of essays on art, literature and performance, sexuality, activism and the life of the city. It features performance artists, writers, dancers, tattooists and DJs, some of them famous, like Marina Abramovic and Mike Parr, while others, like Latai Taumoepeau, Lanny K and Kathleen Mary Fallon, are important figures but less well known. In her portraits of these performers and artists and the scenes they inhabit, McGregor creates an intimate and expansive archive of a kind rarely recorded in our histories.   

Fiona McGregor has a deep and enduring involvement in the worlds she represents. She came of age as an artist during an outpouring of performative queer creativity, in a community that celebrated subversion, dissent and uninhibited partygoing, and in her writing she observes the shift from that moment to new forms of cultural repression. McGregor is a participant in her essays as well as a witness - she sees through an artist’s eyes and records what she perceives with a novelist’s insight. In excavating the lives of others, she reveals her own, and shows the possibilities that exist beneath the surface of our culture.   

‘Compromise-averse, dangerous, this book is also a precious archive of radical art-making witnessed firsthand.’ - Maria Tumarkin