Book Launch | ‘Not Swinging, Swooning’ by Stevan Eldred-Grigg

Join us and Piwaiwaka Press to celebrate the launch of Not Swinging, Swooning, an autobiographical novel about growing up in 1960’s Ōtautahi Christchurch by best-selling author and historian Stevan Eldred-Grigg.

All welcome, refreshments provided. Arrive from 5.30pm for a 6pm start.

This event is free to attend – please RSVP to rsvp@scorpiobooks.co.nz for catering purposes.

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ABOUT THE BOOK:

‘It’s early in the morning,’ a boy writes in his diary, ‘on the first day of the first year of the most modern decade in the whole of human history. Get in the groove!’

Stevan Eldred-Grigg, the boy, is seven years old and one of the middle kids in a nuclear family in a twice-mortgaged new bungalow in a new cul-de-sac in a suburb during the Space Age. Not Swinging, Swooning is the story of the boyhood years of Stevan Eldred-Grigg, told by himself. A story about a boy’s dreams, dreads, hopes, fears and adventures. A story about elbowing and being elbowed by five brothers, three sisters, Seven Sisters, many aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbours, friends, teachers, foes, heroes. A story about pop songs the boy thought were groovy. And about yarns spelled by the olds. Along with other tales he was told, or told himself, about being a boy – being in a suburb – and about becoming, or trying to become, a young man in the mod optimistic hi-gloss world of the sixties of last century.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Stevan Eldred-Grigg is an award-winning novelist, historian and essayist. He grew up in Te Tai Poutini West Coast and Waitaha Canterbury. Graduating with a PhD in history from the Australian National University, he began his writing career in Whangārei. The rest of his life has been spent mostly in Aotearoa New Zealand, although he has lived and written in Berlin, Mexico City, Shanghai, Beijing and Singapore. His home now is Te Whanganui a Tara Wellington, where he hosts Gallery Hanrad in his mod 1960s flat.