Ambassadors

Mandy Sayer is a writer, and has spent much of her life living in and observing King’s Cross.  She has a particular interest in the lives of the women at Lou’s Place as she witnessed first hand the deeply traumatising effects of domestic violence when her own mother packed up her household and left home, taking the then five year old Mandy and her brother away to escape an abusive husband.

Mandy’s subject matter frequently reflects  the struggles of the dispossessed, and her writing has won much critical acclaim. She won the Vogel Award at 26, with her first novel, Mood Indigo. Since then she has been named one of Australia’s Best Young Novelists by the Sydney Morning Herald and has published the novels Blind Luck, The Cross, and The Night has a Thousand Eyes, which won the 2008 Davitt Award for Young Adult Fiction, and the short story collection Fifteen Kinds of Desire.

Sayer’s first memoir, Dreamtime Alice, about the years she spent tap dancing on the streets with her jazz drummer father in New York and New Orleans, won the 2000 National Biography Award, Australian Audio Book of the Year Award, and New England Booksellers’ Award in the U.S. It was published to favourable reviews in the U.S. and U.K. and was translated into several European languages. Her second memoir, Velocity, a prequel about her childhood, won the 2006 South Australian Premier’s Award for Non-Fiction and the 2006 Age Book of the Year (Non-Fiction).

Sayer has also edited the anthology (with Louis Nowra), In the Gutter, Looking at the Stars, a collection of literature set in Sydney’s red-light district, Kings Cross, and The Penguin Book of the Australian Long Story,  (2009).

Sayer is a regular columnist for The Australian, and for the Sydney magazine, The Wentworth Courier, and regularly writes articles and book reviews for major publications, including The Spectator, Australian Literary Review, The Age, The Australian, The Monthly, and the Sydney Morning Herald. Her work has also appeared in scores of literary journals and anthologies in Australia, the U.S., and U.K.

Sayer has a BA and MA from Indiana University, and a Doctorate from the University of Technology, Sydney.

She lives in Sydney with her husband, playwright and author Louis Nowra, and her beloved Chihuahua,  Coco.

Sayer’s next novel, Love in the Years of Lunacy, will be published by Allen & Unwin in Australia in October 2010.

A researcher and social commentator based in New Zealand, Celia Lashlie worked for 15 years within the Prison Service, starting in December 1985 as the first woman to work as a prison officer in a male prison in New Zealand. Her final role within the Service was as Manager of Christchurch Women’s Prison, a position she left in September 1999.

Celia, who has a degree in anthropology and Maori, is the mother of two adult children. She now works on a number of projects, all of which are linked to improving the lives of at-risk children and empowering families to find their own solutions to the challenges they face.

In September 2004, she completed the ‘Good Man’ project. The project, which facilitated discussion within and between 25 boys’ schools throughout New Zealand, aimed to create a working definition of what makes a good man in the 21^st century.

Celia is committed to Lou’s Place because of her passion for making a difference in the lives of women who are living difficult lives and her belief that these women are the key to breaking the intergenerational cycles of neglect and abuse.

She has written two books; The Journey to Prison: Who goes and why, and He’ll Be Ok: Growing Gorgeous Boys into Good Men.