Body: 

Novels

  • The Quarters (Clouds of Magellan Press 2016)

  • Berzoo (Clouds of Magellan Publishing 2011)

  • Playbuilding Playbuilding (Currency Press, 1994) – his book on group-creation with young people is used nationally as a text for drama teachers and was published by Heinemann.

The Quarters by Errol Bray

Civil war in Sydney. Half a million homeless versus the rest. A vengeful defender of the wretched poor - The Hero - fights for them ruthlessly. Meanwhile, Emma - a minor public servant - creates a scheme to house a thousand homeless in an abandoned hospital. With Adrian, the organiser, and heart-on-sleeve Nat, Emma battles to make The Quarters a safe haven for her residents. Then The Hero moves in and everything becomes too exciting and too dangerous...

The Quarters is Errol Bray’s second novel

Paperback and ebook

Published by Clouds of Magellan Press.

LAUNCHED: December 2016

Berzoo by Errol Bray

The impact on my body was electric, like someone had stabbed me in the heart with a syringe of adrenalin ...

Berlin, 1995. The Wall is down, Christo has wrapped the Reichstag, and gay travel writer Roger Staines is fast approaching his fortieth birthday. He's experiencing the usual meaning-of-life angst, but things go completely berzoo when he meets Friedrich of the angelic looks, and Nikki of the flaming red hair.

Ricocheting between Sydney, Berlin and Venice, Roger is caught in a world that travel writing didn’t prepare him for. Worse still, Roger has learnt how to use a gun and he can't put it down.

Errol Bray is a playwright; theatre director and dramaturg; founding director of major youth arts projects; and a sometime academic. He is from Sydney, lives in Brisbane, and travels a lot.

Berzoo is Errol Bray’s first novel and won the Clouds of Magellan GLBT Novel Competition for an emerging novelist in 2010.

Review – DNA Magazine

In 2010, Clouds of Magellan (the Australian publisher of The Indignities and The Shallow End) launched a competition for a new GLBT novel. It was won by Errol Bray and it's easy to see why this immensely readable novel took the prize. Set primarily in Berlin in 1995, 40 year-old travel writer Roger Staines can't believe his luck when Friedrich, "a young German god," falls for him. The sex is incredible and Friedrich even wants to return to Sydney to be with Roger. It seems too good to be true - and it is. Roger is being played. But when the truth is brutally exposed, rather than accept that he was used as a patsy, Roger decides to get revenge. Even though revenge will take Roger well outside his comfort zone and into a world of drug-dealers, addicts, prostitutes, sex slaves, and hardened criminals. Roger is determined to make Friedrich suffer. Though Roger also surprises himself (and the reader) as he outwits criminals and begins to relish shooting a gun, even when it proves fatal. Berzoo begins sedately, but once the betrayal has occured, the narrative kicks off into crime thriller territory. With its vivid characterisation, atmospheric Berlin setting, and narrative twists, this is a well-developed portrait of an unlikely vigilante.

Berzoo by Errol Bray

Paperback

Published by Clouds of Magellan Publishing

LAUNCHED: December 2011