Laura Jean McKay

**Laura Jean McKay** (born 1978) is an Australian author and creative writing lecturer. She is best known for authoring the short story collection *Holiday in Cambodia* (2013), as well as her début novel *The Animals in That Country* (2020).

## Biography

Having grown up on a farm in Sale, in the Gippsland region of the Australian state of Victoria, her adjacency to animals may have influenced her writing in *The Animals in That Country*. After the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, she worked at international aid organizations in Cambodia, and subsequently wrote *Holiday in Cambodia* (2013), published by Black Inc., while completing an MA in creative writing at the University of Melbourne. The short story collection examines the effects of expatriate life and foreign influence on Cambodian people.

Beginning in 2013, after her first work was published, and while working on a PhD at University of Melbourne, she began production on a début novel, a piece of speculative fiction in which a pandemic sparks interspecies communication. Inspired by her experiences with the chikungunya virus, which spread at a writer's festival in Bali in 2013, the release of *The Animals in That Country* at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 was a temporal coincidence. Describing the process of recording the audiobook, McKay said:

> "I had spent years concocting the most impossible virus, only to witness a disease beyond my imagination infecting, killing and driving the real world towards global isolation."
>
>

The novel was well-received and nominated for several awards. In 2021, it notably won the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Since June of 2019, McKay has been a lecturer in creative writing at Massey University in New Zealand.

## Bibliography

### Novels

* —— (2020). *The Animals in That Country* (paperback 1st ed.). Scribe. ISBN 978-1925849530. OCLC 1276806803.

### Collections

* —— (2013). *Holiday in Cambodia* (paperback 1st ed. ed.). Black Inc.. ISBN 978-1863956062.

## References

1. ↑ Laidlaw, E. (2020, February 10). *The 'Real' Cambodia: An interview with Laura Jean McKay — Kill Your Darlings*. Kill Your Darlings. <https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au/2013/09/the-real-cambodia-an-interview-with-laura-jean-mckay/>
2. ↑ Bishop, A. (2013, September 27). *Alice bishop reviews 'Holiday in Cambodia' by Laura Jean McKay*. Australian Book Review. <https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/archive/2013/107-october-2013-no-355/1661-holiday-in-cambodia>
3. ↑ *Turning into a Mosquito: An interview with Laura Jean McKay*. (n.d.). Headland | Literary Frontiers & Emerging Voices. <https://headland.org.nz/issues/issue-15/interview-laura-jean-mckay/>
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 *Laura Jean McKay Wins $100,000 Victorian Literature Prize for The Animals in That Country*. (2021, February 1). The Guardian. <https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/feb/01/laura-jean-mckay-wins-100000-victorian-literature-prize-for-the-animals-in-that-country>
5. ↑ McKay, L. J. (2020, April 6). *The Novel Coronavirus: On Writing a Pandemic, Then Watching It Play Out*. The Spinoff. <https://thespinoff.co.nz/books/06-04-2020/the-novel-coronavirus-on-writing-a-pandemic-then-watching-it-play-out/>
6. ↑ *Aurealis awards 2020 winners announced*. (2021, July 9). Books+Publishing | Book news, publishing news, library news, book reviews, author interviews, publishing jobs, bookseller jobs, book awards, ebooks, Australia, New Zealand, Asia Pacific. https://www.booksandpublishing.com.au/articles/2021/07/09/189384/aurealis-awards-2020-winners-announced/
7. ↑ *The animals in that country wins ABIA’s small publishers’ adult book of the year | the-animals-in-that-country-wins-an-abia | Scribe publications*. (n.d.). Scribe Publications. https://scribepublications.com.au/blog/the-animals-in-that-country-wins-an-abia