Magda Szubanski announces exciting career move after overcoming cancer

Much-loved Australian comedian and actress Magda Szubanski has announced an exciting new career direction after overcoming cancer.

A month after announcing she was in remission following a battle with a rare form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, it has been revealed the Kath & Kim star has authored a second memoir to be released later this year.

The new book will be released in September and is described as "a eulogy" to Szubanski's "beloved mother, Margaret" and "for everyone who has loved or lost someone, or tried to hold themselves together when life demands everything at once".

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Text Publishing announced the book this week with the following statement. "2017 was the year I finally grew up. My mother was dying and I was catapulted into the forefront of a bitter cultural and political battle: the same-sex marriage survey.

"I Can't Tell You But I Will is the true tale of how I came to understand the unseen powers that shape our world, and learned how to stand up to them while staying true to your soul and to the people you speak for.

"Most of all, though, it is a eulogy for my beloved mother, Margaret: like my Celtic ancestors, I am 'keening' her life, singing of the terrible beauty of caring for someone you love as they die.

"This is the story of how I went from comedian to campaigner, from daughter to orphan, and from naïve idealist to pragmatic warrior."

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The book is also likely to detail Szubanski's battle with stage four mantle cell lymphoma, which she revealed in May 2025.

She has updated fans several times during her battle with the disease. Then just last month, she took to Instagram again to reveal she was in remission.

Magdalene Szubanski was born in Liverpool, England, to a Scottish-Irish mother and Polish father, who moved to Melbourne when she was four. 

She told the ABC show 7.30 in 2015 that her father was recruited to a top secret counter-intelligence squad when he was a teen and worked as an assassin, killing traitors who were giving secrets to the Nazis or telling Nazis where Jewish people were hiding.

While studying fine arts and philosophy at the University of Melbourne, Szubanski appeared in a law faculty review.

After graduating, she was asked to join a group of fellow Melbourne Uni graduates including Rob Sitch, Santo Cilauro, Michael Veitch and Tom Gleisner in a new ABC-TV sketch show, The D-Generation.

It led to a role on another sketch show, Fast Forward, before she joined friends Gina Riley and Jane Turner in an all-female Australian sketch comedy TV program, Big Girl's Blouse.

The characters Riley and Turner created for one of the sketches formed the basis for the TV show Kath & Kim, with Szubanski creating the character of the netball-loving but lonely Sharon Strzelecki.

Kath & Kim debuted in 2002, and became one of the ABC's highest-ever rating TV shows, while the character of Sharon Strzelecki became a cultural icon.

Szubanski came out to her parents in 1992 after a women's magazine journalist asked if she was 'homosexual'.

She later became a campaigner for LGBTQA+ rights and was a vocal supporter of same-sex marriage in the lead-up to the 2017 referendum.

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