Roseghetto Launch with Kirsty Jagger and Kathryn Heyman

Shayla is on a newspaper assignment when she returns to the public housing estate where she grew up and finds it demolished. The locals have been evicted, their homes erased, their stories too. Standing among the rubble of Rosemeadow, Shayla is assailed by her memories of living there. The bad secret Daddy asked her to keep. Mummy rekindling a dangerous romance. Making friends with ‘the gutter kids’.

Surrounded by poverty, confronted by domestic violence, Shayla found her escape in reading. Now it’s time to tell the stories of Rosemeadow, including her own.

Roseghetto is an unforgettable and moving coming-of-age story, an account of breaking the cycle of violence and poverty.

Kirsty Jagger is a journalist by trade. In 2019, she won the inaugural Heyman Mentorship Award, established by acclaimed Australian author Kathryn Heyman for a writer from a background of social or economic disadvantage. Roseghetto takes some inspiration from growing up in the housing commission estates of Sydney’s western suburbs. This is her first novel.

Kathryn Heyman is a novelist, essayist and scriptwriter. Her memoir, Fury, appeared in May 2021 receiving widespread critical acclaim. Her sixth novel, Storm and Grace, was published in 2017. Her first novel, The Breaking, was shortlisted for the Stakis Award for the Scottish Writer of the Year and longlisted for the Orange Prize. Kathryn’s other awards include an Arts Council of England Writers Award, the Wingate and the Southern Arts Awards, and nominations for the Edinburgh Fringe Critics’ Awards, the Kibble Prize, and the West Australian Premier’s Book Awards.