Dr Laura Jean McKay had just finished editing a novel about a viral pandemic and left behind raging bush fires in her homeland to take up a teaching job here, when life began imitating art. Cue Covid-19. Her book, titled 'The Animals in That Country', has just taken out Australia’s most valuable literary prize.
Now teaching creative writing at Massey University, Dr McKay is coming to grips with the “life-changing” success of winning the AU$100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature, as well as the AU$25,000 Fiction Award, announced in February. In the novel, a rogue virus gives infected humans the ability to understand animals. While she defines it – her first published novel – as “speculative fiction”, aspects of the pandemic theme turned out to be scarily accurate.
As bush fires burned out of control in New South Wales and Victoria at the end of 2019, the first cases of coronavirus were emerging in China as she was doing final edits prior to publication with Scribe. She briefly returned to Australia to make an audio recording of the book. It was just before lockdown. “There I was, reading out scenes of people locking down, wearing masks. Then I would go out to the supermarket in Sydney and people were wearing masks – there were these weird replications!”
Set in Australia in the near future, the ambitiously imaginative work pivots around Jean, a tough-talking middle-aged ranger in the midst of divorce who likes her smokes and booze and prefers the company of non-human creatures. Animal characters include a dingo named Sue as well as a cast of birds, insects, mice, wallabies, a koala and a whale.
“The main idea was that we all have connections to other animals whether we like animals or not…yet we sort of see ourselves as superior because we have language,” she says. Her novel explores “what would happen if we took away that language barrier. What would happen if we could finally understand what they were saying?".
A frightening encounter with the animal world has shaped her life and writing, heightening an awareness of the fragile boundaries between humans and non-humans. She attended a writers’ festival in Bali in 2013, was bitten by a mosquito and contracted the rare disease chikungunya. “Health workers describe it as being like dengue on crack," she told Australia’s ABC News.
Symptoms included extreme fever, peeling skin and arthritis that made her so weak she could barely lift a glass of water, or crawl up stairs to her writing desk. She became so delirious with fever that “at one point I thought I must be turning into a mosquito – I thought that’s the only explanation for what’s happening to me”. Amazingly, she had just begun her PhD and was able to work on this intermittently as her health slowly improved.
Always an avid reader, Dr McKay says her writing reflects her background in humanitarian work and her interest in researching post-colonialism and de-colonialism. A deep awareness of power structures is at the essence of her writing.
Melbourne to Manawatū
Coming to New Zealand with her Kiwi partner Tom Doig, also an author, Dr McKay says she is excited by the energy and support of the creative writing department at Massey. “It’s filled with active writers who are passionate about the craft, who are producing amazing works all the time and who are dedicated to the programme – it’s really exciting.”
She is teaching first year courses in Creative Writing and Creative Communication as part of the Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Communication programmes and will teach a new Eco-Fiction and Non-Fiction paper she is coordinating with Associate Professor Ingrid Horrocks in Semester Two.
For more information on studying Creative Writing in Massey’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences - www.massey.ac.nz/massey/learning/programme-course.
For more information on studying Creative Writing, search keywords: Massey University/creative writing/Bachelor of Arts.
To win a copy of Laura’s book email us at humsocsci@massey.ac.nz with ‘Book giveaway’ in the subject line with your details. And tell us (in the body of the email) – if you could choose one animal to communicate with, what would it be and why?
