UQP acquires exquisite new novel from Debra Adelaide

UQP is delighted to announce that we've acquired the superb new book from highly acclaimed author Debra Adelaide, entitled When I am Sixty-Four. Told through fragments, this novel is about a writer reflecting on the final days of a friend and fellow writer, one whom she has known since childhood. Despite their shared past and seemingly parallel lives, she discovers that their memories of collective experience often diverse or have been expunged along the way.

Based on Debra Adelaide's lifelong friendship with Gabrielle Carey, When I am Sixty-Four explores universal themes of inherited trauma and grief; friendship, loyalty and ageing; and the tensions between motherhood and creativity.

Publisher Aviva Tuffield says:

‘This work of autofiction, based on the close friendship between two women, now in their sixties, who are both writers and have known each other since high school, is nothing less than mesmerising. Episodic, reflective and profound, When I Am Sixty-Four weaves in and out of their shared experiences and musings, their professional and personal trials and tribulations, while also grappling with the dark shadow of suicide and depression. I was incredibly moved by this book and I know so many readers are going to be too.’

Debra Adelaide says:

‘I neither planned, let alone wanted, to write this sort of book, however the idea for it gripped me with such force I was compelled to do so. Like every work of fiction I have written When I Am Sixty-Four is an attempt to answer a question or solve a problem, however in this case that problem was not clear to me until I reached the end of the first draft, when something struck me clearly: my friend who is the subject of this novella spent her writing career interrogating her complex life and the many forces that shaped it. She would have been compelled to write about this final traumatic period of her life. So I realised that I was doing what she could not, confronting issues like the creative writing life, the influence of reading, the slippery nature of memory, and the endless ripples of unresolved grief. I didn’t write this book intending it to be a tribute or for therapy, but I can see now that it is both, as well as offering narrative possibilities for those elements in my friend’s life that ultimately determined her fate.’

About Debra Adelaide

Dr Debra Adelaide is the author or editor of 18 books, including fiction, non-fiction, edited collections and reference works. Her first novel was The Hotel Albatross, published in 1995 and republished in 2009. Her other books include edited collections, such as A Bright and Fiery Troop (on Australian women writers, 1988); the popular Motherlove series (1996, 1997, 1998); and Acts of Dog (2003). Her novel The Household Guide to Dying was published to critical acclaim in Australia in 2008 and in many other countries including the UK, the USA, Canada, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, China and Brazil; it was short- and long-listed for several literary awards, including the former international Orange Prize, now the Women’s Prize, for fiction.

Other fiction includes Letter to George Clooney (2013), which was shortlisted for the Nita B. Kibble Award, The Women’s Pages (2015), and Zebra (2019), winner of the Steele Rudd Award for short fiction in the Queensland Literary Awards. Her most recent books are The Innocent Reader: Reflections on reading and writing (2019) and Creative Writing Practice: reflections on form & process (edited with Sarah Attfield, 2021). She taught creative writing for 20 years and is now an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Technology Sydney.

Debra has been a judge of a number of literary awards including the Vogel/Australian award for younger writers, the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, the Nita B. Kibble Awards for women writers, the Patrick White Award, and the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. She has been the Fiction editor for Southerly, Australia’s oldest literary journal, several times, and currently mentors/advises emerging writers. She lives and writes on Bidjigal country in Sydney’s inner west.

UQP has acquired world rights from Jane Novak Literary Agency and will publish in April 2026.

For more information, contact UQP Marketing & Publicity Manager Jean Smith on jean.smith@uqp.com.au.