Description:
Game of Thrones meets Wake in Fright meets Kill Bill meets The Simpsons - Nock Loose is like nothing else in OzLit.
Brief description: Patrick Marlborough is an underemployed writer/comedian/drongo living with their parents in Walyalup, Western Australia. They have been published in Vice, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, The Saturday Paper, Slate, Gawker, Meanjin, Crikey, Kotaku, The Lifted Brow, Kill Your Darlings, Cordite, Going Down Swinging and various other forgotten blogs, magazines and anthologies. The manuscript for their first novel, A Horse Held at Gunpoint, was shortlisted for the Fogarty Literary Award in 2021 and is still looking for a publisher. They are the founder and editor of The Yeah Nah Review, as well as Wharf Rat Press. They co-author all of their work with the ghost of their bad dog, Buckley, who is solely responsible for any problematic elements therein.
Review Quotes:
'Marlborough is that rarest thing: a dangerous Australian writer. Read them before it's too late.' Michael Winkler
'Mad, rad and merciless: Australia's own energy-drink-era Vonnegut.' Sam George-Allen
'Nock Loose runs a rake over decades of D-Grade Australian culture and draws a narrative between all that was caught between the tines. Feeling like the cinematic amalgam of a nineties daytime talk show, an op shop joke book, and a hijacked reddit thread, only Marlborough could (or would) write this book.' Max Easton
'Patrick Marlborough's Nock Loose is a wryly post-modern and cynically satirical novel that hits the ground running and never lets up ... audacious, macabre and deeply felt.' Anica Boulanger-Mashberg, Books+Publishing
Fogarty Literary Award (shortlisted, 2023)