Olivia De Zilva's Plastic Budgie is a brutally funny and inventive debut about family and self, full of itchy Y2K nostalgia, curses and glimpses of birds.

‘There was no use googling am I cursed because the search engine algorithm would always say yes.’

Olivia was named after a lycra-clad singer her parents saw on Rage. As a child, she lost the ability to speak and spent a year barking like a dog. Her Gong Gong bought her a yellow bird in a shoebox from the Adelaide Central Markets. Her heart was broken by a guitar teacher after a school disco. She started university and learnt to run and travelled to Guangzhou for her cousin’s wedding. 

In her brutally funny, genre-defying debut, Olivia De Zilva collects stories on shelves: neat coming-of-age anecdotes and sitcom characters trapped behind glass. 

Then she breaks it all apart. 

Plastic Budgie questions how our memories and families form us, in a way that is both unapologetically sentimental and eternally surprising. It is full of itchy Y2K nostalgia, curses and glimpses of birds.

Details

ISBN13: 9781763554146
Format: Paperback / softback
Number of Pages: 240
Edition:
Publication Date: 29 Jul 2025
Publisher: Pink Shorts Press
Publication City, Country: Australia
Dimensions (cm): 21(H)x13.5(L)
Weight (gm):

Author Biography

Olivia De Zilva is a writer based on Kaurna Yerta/Adelaide, Australia. She has been awarded and shortlisted for prizes including the Deakin University Non-Fiction Prize, the Kat Muscat Fellowship and the Richell Prize for Emerging Writers. Her work has been published in The Guardian, Westerly, Liminal, SBS, Cordite Poetry Review, Mascara Literary Review and Australian Poetry Journal, among others. Olivia graduated with a Master of Philosophy from the University of Queensland; her thesis explored the representation of Asian-diasporic identity in contemporary Australian publishing. 

Reviews