The Mermaid Chronicles by Megan Dunn

The true tale of how one woman’s lifelong obsession became a midlifemermaid odyssey, from the irrepressibly witty author of Tinderbox and ThingsI Learned at Art School.

Forty, freckled and facing infertility, writer and disgruntled projectmanager Megan Dunn hears the siren call that reawakens her lifelong obsessionand sets off in pursuit of mermaids. Real mermaids.

From Coney Island and Copenhagen to Courtenay Place, Wellington, New Zealand;from Waterhouse’s clas­sic painting A Mermaid to the 1984 romantic comedySplash to Skyping the first freelance mermaids of the new millennium, herodyssey takes her fathoms deep to strange and unlikely places, probing thecollective unconscious and asking the question that has plagued humans formillennia: What is it about mermaids?

Diving into the caves of her own life, Megan loses the plot but finds hervoice and hears the mermaids singing.

Shimmeringly intellectual and devastatingly deadpan, tragicomic and true, TheMermaid Chronicles is an off-the-hook tale about sx and marriage, mothers anddaughters, middle age, women’s work, obsession, the stories we tell ourselvesand the myths that define us all.
(And Daryl Hannah, too.)

About the Author:
Megan Dunn is the author of two irreverent works of non-fiction Tinderbox(Galley Beggar Press, 2017) and her memoir in essays Things I Learned at ArtSchool (Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2021.) Megan is as an art critic andessayist in New Zealand. She has published columns, reviews, personal essays andfeatures for a wide range of media including the Guardian Australia, The NewZealand Listener, Metro, Newsroom and Art News New Zealand. She was once thevisual arts correspondent on Radio New Zealand’s Saturday morning show, withbroadcaster Kim Hill. So there. Megan graduated with a master’s in creativewriting from the University of East Anglia. In 2006, she won an Escalator awardfrom the New Writing Partnership (now the National Centre for Writing.) In2022 she was the annual Writer in Residence at the International Institute ofModern Letters, based at Victoria University of Wellington, Te Herenga Waka.During this residency she worked on the first draft of her mer-moir and alsocurated an art exhibition The Mermaid Chronicles, based on her journeys to meetthe world’s leading professional mermaids. You can watch a short clip ofMegan speaking about mermaids on TVNZ. Megan has chaired literary events withnational and international authors including Rachel Kushner, Olivia Laing andNoelle McCarthy.
Megan lives and works in Wellington. She is also interested in crocodiles.

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