by Susanna Ellis
Winner of the NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize publishes September 2026
A ghost moves into a woman’s apartment and begins to cough up teeth. A town keeps building as the sea prepares to take it back. A daughter inherits hunger like an heirloom.
In this collection of short stories set along a shifting coastline, the boundaries between body and memory, human and nonhuman, landscape and ocean begin to slip and strain. Houses tilt, animals and ghosts press in, and what is carried – grief, desire, damage – refuses to stay contained.
Patron Saints of Roadkill is a darkly tender collection, revealing a world where the familiar is made strange and the strange is given i
ts rightful place in the landscape of things.
Susanna Elliffe is a fiction writer based in Ōamaru. She was the 2025 winner of the NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize.
Her short stories have been recognised in national and international competitions including the Sunday Star-Times Short Story Competition, the Bridport Prize, the Hope Prize and the Sargeson Prize. When not writing, Susanna can be found on stage or adding to her collection of degrees.
“Hauntingly beautiful, beautifully haunted, these strange, salt-slicked stories will slip under your skin. They thrum with heartbeat energy, the rattling percussion of bones.” TRACY FARR, author of Wonderland
“Part poetry, part sucker punch, Susanna Elliffe’s debut collection ‘pops like a bubble’ on the reader’s consciousness. A startlingly fresh approach to Aotearoa storytelling.” LEE MURRAY, author of Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud
