Will Elliott – September 11 2016

Queensland Disability Action Week – September 11-17 2016

Will is a literary horror fiction writer who dropped out of a law degree at 20 when he developed schizophrenia. Although his debut novel, The Pilo Family Circus, and its sequel, The Pilo Traveling Show, are about a young man struggling with a psychotic alter-ego, Will has said they are not autobiographical. Will’s other works include the short stories Ain’t no ordinary ham and Pre-emptive Strike, his ‘Pendulum Trilogy’ novels, Pilgrim, Shadow and World’s End, and the comic fantasies Nightfall and Inside Out. Will won the ABC Fiction Award in 2006, The Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist Award in 2007, and went on to win the Ditmar and Golden Aurealis Best Novel Awards, the Aurealis Horror Novel and Australian Shadows Awards as well as the Nocte Best Foreign Book Award. Will currently lives in Brisbane.

Jamie’s tyres squealed to a halt. Standing in the glare of the headlights was an apparition dressed in a puffy shirt with a garish flower pattern It wore oversized red shoes, striped pants and white face paint. It stared at him with ungodly boggling eyes, then turned away…This seemingly random incident triggers a nightmarish chain of events as Jamie finds he is being stalked by a trio of gleefully sadistic clowns who deliver a terrifying ultimatum to join the centuries old Pilo circus. Plunged into an horrific alternate universe peopled by the gruesome, grotesque and monstrous, where violence and savagery are the norm, Jamie finds that his worst enemy is himself – for when he applies the white face paint, he is transformed into JJ, the most vicious clown of all. And JJ wants Jamie dead.

Strange Places: A Memoir of Mental Illness
ABC Books, 2009; ISBN 9780730495826
A darkly humorous, insightful and searingly honest first-hand account of a journey through schizophrenia from a prodigiously talented writer. In 2006 Will Elliott had his first novel, The Pilo Family Circus, published to great acclaim, nationally and internationally. What nobody knew was that the young author of that work of terrifying fantasy had recently recovered from a psychotic episode and been diagnosed as schizophrenic. Strange Places takes us on a journey through psychosis and out the other side, documenting the delusions, the drugs and the insights that recovery brings. A beautifully written memoir of a harrowing – and enlightening – time, from one of Australia’s best young writers.