the animals in that country laura jean mckay

Her breakthrough came in Bali in 2013 via another creature. 'Once I found her, it really took off.'īut at that point, McKay still hadn't figured out how she would contrive for her human characters and animal ones to understand each other. She's been through a bit she can bear it.

'And then I thought: who can carry this novel? Who can carry the weight of an animal apocalypse? A middle-aged woman can. Wonnangatta premiered in September 2020 at Sydney Theatre Company - the first production since the statewide shutdown of live performance in March. The Prize for Drama was won by Victorian playwright Angus Cerini, for Wonnangatta: a Gothic two-hander set in Victoria's alpine high country in early 1918 - and inspired by a real-life double homicide that was never solved. Other award winners include singer-songwriter Archie Roach, who won the Prize for Indigenous Writing for his memoir Tell Me Why: The Story of My Life and My Music and journalist Paddy Manning, who won the Non-Fiction Prize for Body Count: How Climate Change is Killing Us. 'That has just been completely unreachable ,' she said. She said the prize money meant she and her partner (writer Tom Doig, a New Zealander by birth) might be able to 'finally lay our hats down somewhere' and put a deposit on a home.

Speaking to ABC from New Zealand, where she relocated in June 2019 for a university teaching job, McKay described the impact of the awards as 'astronomical'. In the fiction category, McKay's novel was up against The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan, Our Shadows by Gail Jones, and The Coconut Children by Vivian Pham.

Our protagonist is alcoholic animal park worker and grandmother Jean, who teams up with a dingo called Sue on a road trip of survival. McKay's book, which was published in April 2020 as coronavirus swept the world, imagines a possible near-future Australia where a 'zoo flu' sweeps the country, giving infected humans the ability to understand animals. McKay happened to write a novel with flu virus at its centre.

The animals in that country laura jean mckay