Palmerston North author Laura Jean McKay has won the 2021 Victorian Prize for Literature.
Laura Jean McKay comes from an animal-obsessed family.
"We've always been people who stare at animals."
Her interest in animals, talent and sheer hard work have resulted in a $125,000 pay day.
Laura has won the 2021 Victorian Prize for Literature, part of the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. With a $100,000 prize, it is Australia's richest literary prize.
Her debut novel, The Animals in That Country, also took out the fiction category and $25,000.
Laura is from Victoria, but work brought her to Palmerston North in June 2019. She is a lecturer in creative writing at Massey University.
She had been working contract to contract at the University of Melbourne, which was "lovely but scary".
Partner Tom Doig is from Wellington and he now also works at Massey.
The Animals in That Country explores what would happen if we could finally understand what animals are saying. Readers come into the idea through the eyes of Jean, Laura says.
Jean loves a drink and a smoke and finds it difficult to get along with other people. But she loves animals and works at a zoo.
A pandemic breaks out and infected people can understand animals. Jean gets sick and realises animals are not saying what we want them to say.
"So it's a bit like 'careful what you wish for Jean'."
A chatty dingo named Sue is a central character and Sue and Jean go on a road trip.
Victorian Premier's Literary Awards judges said, "McKay's novel is daring, original and ambitious, with a highly inventive use of language.
"The novel is written with energy and profound empathy, provoking the reader to consider their place in the world, and ensuring they will never see animals in the same way again."
A day after Monday's announcement Laura tweeted it had "been the most astonishing 24 hours of my life". She also wrote "I'm beyond speech".
When Laura spoke to the Guardian three says after the announcement, she said she was "still inarticulate, barely able to string a sentence together about it".
She's had hundreds of messages from people sending congratulations and love.
"People have just put so much effort into reaching out," she says.
"I can't really express how wonderful this award is even though I'm a writer. I don't think there are words to express how life-changing this award is."
Laura says it's an honour to be recognised by her home state, especially a state that has gone through so much with fires and lockdowns.
Reviewers have called the book "affecting" and one that stayed with them after the last page.
"This is a work of not only remarkable linguistic skill but also one that brilliantly captures our relationship with the inhabitants of this wild world," The Big Issue wrote.
Laura started writing The Animals in That Country in 2013, after she sent short story collection, Holiday in Cambodia, to print. A month later she got chikungunya virus – a mosquito-borne disease she picked up in Bali.
"I was very ill through a lot of the writing of it."
Now free of the disease, Laura battles weekly migraines. While they are exhausting she does get some "pretty amazing insights" in the middle of a migraine attack.
People who live with chronic illness often see the world in a different way because they never know when they are going to have an attack, she says. They tend to work very hard because they have to work in the times they can.
Laura grew up in Sale in the Gippsland region of Victoria. She says Palmerston North is similar to Sale in that it is flat, farming country with mountains in the distance. Sale is pretty much "Palmy in Australia".
But after living in Melbourne there were adjustments to be made.
"It was hard coming from a great big city to a smaller town but I was lucky. The people I work with are so generous and so friendly and welcoming."
Also welcoming is Dr Kererū, a kererū who perches in the gutter outside her office window that overlooks Bledisloe Park. Dr Kererū provides Laura with her "animal fix".
Laura says when she came to Massey's Manawatū campus and met the people she would be working with "it just felt so right and luckily they thought it felt right too".
It's been a big week for Laura; as well as winning the two prizes, she was made permanent full-time at Massey.
Laura has a PhD in creative writing with a focus on literary animal studies from the University of Melbourne.
She says literary animal studies looks at the way animals are talked about in literature. Traditionally, novels are about the human experience and animals are often metaphors. How do we represent animals in novels? Can they be something other than metaphors? Does reading literature change our mind about something, open the door to a new perspective?
When Laura started writing Animals, she was eating meat but is now a vegan.
"After a while it breaks you because you are doing so much research into what we do to them."
In Sale, Laura lived on a horse farm with cats, dogs and redback spiders. She says going on bush walks in Australia is about interacting with animals such as echidnas, kangaroos, wombats, wallabies and platypuses.
Laura feels like she is always looking down and listening when walking in the Australian bush, while in New Zealand it's about looking up for birds.
"It's a different sort of wild experience here, more about looking up."
On Laura's to-see list are kiwi, native bats and carnivorous land snails, the latter she has learnt suck worms up through their mouth just like we eat spaghetti.
She bikes to work past dairy cows. "I do always stop and say hello to the cows, they haven't spoken back yet."
