Author(s): Dominic Hoey

Novel | Aotearoa Fiction

Monday Woolridge is a fighter with a face covered in scars and life full of debt. Her Avondale flat has no furniture, her father's dead, her catatonic mother's in an expensive nursing home and her kickboxing gym is going to Thailand. Monday's shitty bartending job pays fifty cents over minimum wage, and she desperately needs another way to generate income. Dealing drugs off the dark web with her flatmate JJ looks like it's working - until it really doesn't, and the pair have to flee Tamaki Makaurau to escape the gangsters, the vampires and the ghosts of Monday's past. This is a pacy, heart-twisting, punch-in-the-guts, darkly comic novel that captures life on the poverty line in Aotearoa now. From the award-winning poet and playwright Dominic Hoey, author of Iceland, I Thought We'd Be Famous, and the 2021 SST Short Story Award winner, 1986.Praise for Iceland, his first book "It's kind of renegade literature ... this book has an energy conspicuously absent in much New Zealand fiction."- Steve Braunias, The Spinoff

'Written with compassion and skill, Poor People with Money is a violent uprising of a novel. This is New Zealand.' - Pip Adam 'Dominic couldn't spell academia if he tried. He's dyslexic. But he's a savant story teller. His superpower is making ugly look sexy. He writes for the marginalised. In our country of right-wing sheep farmers and working-class ram raids, we need him to be reporting live from the crime scene. He's all we got.' - Tom Scott, musician 'Fighting is the perfect metaphor for hard times. It teaches us to come to terms with our own morality, our capacity for good and for bad. Dom finds beauty in this struggle, in the space between hope and despair.' - Matt Williams, Bones MMA

Author Biography: Dominic Hoey is a poet, author and playwright based in Auckland, New Zealand. His debut novel Iceland was a New Zealand bestseller, long-listed for the 2018 Ockham Book Award and his short story 1986 won the 2021 Sunday Star Times Short Story Award. His latest poetry collection I Thought We'd Be Famous was released in October 2019. Dominic has written and performed two one-person hit shows about his bone disease and his inability to get arts funding. In a former life, Dominic was an MC battle and slam-poetry champion. Through his Learn To Write Good creative writing course, Dominic has taught hundreds of students around the world how to think dyslexic. He also works with young people through the Atawhai program, teaching art, yoga and meditation to help them with their mental health and self-esteem. Currently he lives with a small, vicious dog and dreams of one day owning an animal rescue farm.