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A first-time novelist has won Australia’s richest literary award with her apocalyptic, oddly timed tale of a world in the throes of a pandemic.
Dr Laura Jean McKay won the $ 100,000 Victorian Literature Prize on Monday for The Animals of This Country, a debut novel described by Guardian critic Justine Jordan as a fierce and amusing exploration of other consciousnesses and the limits of language.
The prescient nature of the work is purely coincidental, McKay told The Guardian, speaking from her home in Palmerston North, New Zealand, where she has taught creative writing at Massey University for the past 18 months. She started writing the novel six years before the world heard about Covid-19.
The fantastic premise of the work centers on an epidemic of “zooflu” which allows its infected victims to communicate with animals.
The concept came to her during a long battle with the chikungunya virus – a mosquito-borne illness she describes as “crack dengue” – which she contracted at a writers’ festival in Bali. .
“I was living with this strange disease and it just started to infect my book,” she says. “It gives you kind of arthritis and I couldn’t move very well for about two years. All of my skin peeled off my body.
“I felt like I was turning into a mosquito and I had these very strange hallucinations. And from there, I started to write this novel; that’s when the disease really started to take off on the pages – as it took off in my body. “
Large parts of the book were written using voice-to-text recognition technology; it was too painful for McKay to use a keyboard.
The genesis of the theme of human-animal communication – something resembling an apocalyptic Dr Doolittle – had been brewing in his imagination for much longer; McKay had previously completed her PhD focusing on Literary Animal Studies from the University of Melbourne, and became a co-presenter for ABC Listen’s Animal Sound Safari.
The title of the book is taken from a poem by Margaret Atwood of the same name.
“She’s so well known for her prose and I really love her work in it,” says McKay of the Canadian author, who has won the Booker Prize twice. “But part of his poetry, especially his writings on animals, really speaks of this moment of encounter with a species very different from us or very wild.
“Her poetry is very real, very real and quite brutal and honest, and I love that about her.”
Despite being McKay’s debut novel, his 2013 short story collection Holiday in Cambodia was shortlisted for three national literary awards.
Other winners in the 2021 Victoria Prime Minister’s Literary Awards category included journalist Paddy Manning, who won the non-fiction award for Body Count: How Climate Change is Killing Us. The Associate Culture Editor at Guardian Australia’s Stephanie Convery received high praise in the non-fiction category for After the Count: The Death of Davey Browne, an investigation into the 2015 death of Australian boxer David Browne Jr.
Musician Archie Roach won the Indigenous Writing Award for his memoir Tell Me Why: The Story of My Life and My Music and the Playwright Award went to Angus Cerini for Wonnangatta, which premiered at the Sydney Theater Company last September.
The Poetry Prize was awarded to David Stavanger for his work on mental health, entitled Case Notes. Each category winner receives $ 25,000.
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