Where authors talk directly about their life, their books and many more things.
Writing a crime thriller marks the author as a slightly suspicious person; perhaps even a downright shady one – or so I’ve recently discovered. My debut novel, Other People’s Houses, was released in March and I’ve lost count of the number of friends and family – even strangers – who’ve asked how, and why, I …
Having just submitted my tenth novel, I find myself reflecting on the craft of writing and some of the challenges that come with having a long backlist. I was in my late twenties when I started writing my first novel. Writing was a hobby, a way of escaping the stress of my corporate job. I …
Looking back, the leap seems inconceivable. But when the notion first arrived I could not ignore it. I’d taken up law as a second career in my thirties. It was challenging, stimulating, sometimes thrilling, ultimately lucrative and I thrived on it. But twenty years on it had lost its lustre. I wasn’t even sure what I …
In 2013 I was at an unusual one-off writers’ festival in the beautiful Adelaide Botanic Garden. The Body in the Garden Festival combined crime and garden writers – the premise being that they both required the digging up or burying of things. Between panels, I was fortunate to sit down for a coffee and a …
When we pick up a crime novel, we have expectations. Perhaps we anticipate that it will have a serious crime, or a memorable, possibly larger-than-life central character … or two or three. We may want high stakes, something surprising yet credible, or a story packed with rising conflict, making it powerful and urgent. But what …
Fictional detectives find bodies in weird places: in trains, on cliffs, at bus stops, on altars, in kitchens, libraries, washed up on beaches, even in the guts of predators. The murder’s wider setting often surprises readers too. When detectives hunt criminals in exotic locations, the landscape can even become the star of the story. Just …
A dramatic moment in modern history, crimes small and large, and an unusual narrative structure. Kirsten McKenzie talks about her latset book The Forger and the Thief.
“So why do you think that you can write a novel at your age?” my friends asked me. The simple answer is, I didn’t. I would like to say that I’ve been passionately writing since I could hold a pen but that simply is not true. Admittedly I’ve scribbled way through life with poems for …
A few years ago I met Chris Cleave at a writers’ forum in Auckland. He had just published Everyone Brave is Forgiven and had opened the forum with a beautiful speech about the power of fiction in the age of hate. Sitting in the auditorium beside novelists Catherine Robertson and Vanda Symon, I felt like …
“Trust me. Listen up and let me tell you a story.” It’s the enticing entreaty from story-makers everywhere, from authors to social media influencers to politicians. Who should we trust? And why? As authors, we want our readers to trust us. “Open the page,” we say, “come on in. We’ve created a fiction just for …