Fairytales come true for some Aussie authors

WRITING a best-selling book and being able to quit your day job is the stuff of fairytales. Authors Graeme Simsion, Jane Harper and Hannah Kent talk about how their hit debut novels changed their lives.

Loved Australian author Hannah Kent. Picture: Nicki Connolly

WRITING a best-selling book and being able to quit your day job is the stuff of fairytales. Authors Graeme Simsion, Jane Harper and Hannah Kent talk about how their hit debut novels changed their lives.

GRAEME SIMSION

MOST avid readers have one book that changed their life. For Graeme Simsion, that book is The Rosie Project, his 2013 debut novel.

Having sold 3.5 million copies around the world, it’s the book that enabled Simsion to give up his day job as a data modelling consultant and become a full-time writer.

“One of the things writers struggle with, it’s hard to make a living. Most writers have got jobs as well,” Simsion says. “If you are trying to break into that world, you are doing it without the same available time that they have.

“I know a lot of writers who have partners who are working nine to five so they can write. It’s a tremendous amount of pressure on the writer.”

Author Graeme Simsion at home. Picture: Sarah Matray

But generally, the Fitzroy author says debut novels do really well.

“Part of that is because the bar is higher for debut novels.”

The Rosie Project is the story of Don Tillman, a professor on the Asperger’s scale, and his quest to find a wife.

Simsion, 61, believes it resonated simply because people like love stories. But he adds, “There’s a real interest in people like Don Tillman now. In the past the nerds of this world were a bit insulated from the rest of the community. Now, because of the computer revolution, we all know someone like Don Tillman.”

The Rosie Project took out the 2014 Australian Book Industry Awards Book of the Year and the sequel, The Rosie Effect, is also now a bestseller, having sold more than a million copies.

Simsion had set a 500,000 sales target for The Rosie Project when he saw his wife reading a book he’d never heard of that proclaimed on its cover that it had reached that pinnacle.

He admits that 3.5 million “was a little more than I was hoping for” but hopes the size of sales has been an instrument in the acceptance of Asperger’s.

Graeme Simsion’s debut novel The Rosie Project.

The book began as an idea for a screenplay when Simsion started a screenwriting course in 2007. Ironically, it is now being developed as a film. Sony has optioned The Rosie Project, recently extending it for another six months, with Ben Taylor, of Catastrophe fame, appointed director.

Simsion is sworn to secrecy, but an A-list star has been picked to play Rosie and there’s a shortlist for Don. There have been some hurdles, but Simsion is confident The Rosie Project will make it to the big screen.

“It’s all you can reasonably hope for as a writer,” he says of his lightning success.

Butfour years on from publishing The Rosie Project, it is now one of three Simsion novels that could become movies. Toni Collette optioned his 2016 book The Best of Adam Sharp and Ellen DeGeneres has optioned yet-to-be released Two Steps Forward with Fox Searchlight.

The book Two Steps Forward will be released next month. Set on the Camino trails, the network of ancient pilgrim routes in Europe, it is a collaboration between Simsion and his wife of 28 years, accomplished author Anne Buist.

Graeme Simsion and his wife Anne Buist have written a book together that will be launched next month. Picture: Sarah Matray

The pair, who have walked the Camino, planned the book together and then wrote separate stories back in 2012, Simsion as male character Martin and Buist as Zoe. The plan was to publish the books side-by-side. In the end, the books were spliced together.

“Over that period I’d say we probably had a couple of hours of shouting and being annoyed and no more than that over five years. It’s been a really productive collaboration,” Simsion says.

“When you are married, you’re on the same page. People assume it must have put a strain on the marriage. It did the opposite.

“We did something that very, very few couples have pulled off.”

Simsion has some pretty straightforward advice for anyone hoping to follow in his tracks and write a novel.

Two Steps Forward, by Graeme Simsion and Anne Buist, will be released by Text Publishing on October 2.

Approach it like you would if you wanted to become a neurosurgeon, he says. That means getting yourself educated, putting in the hard work and being prepared for the long journey ahead.

In the meantime, he is planning what he hopes will be a very funny sequel to The Rosie Effect.

“I’m going to come back to them (Don and Rosie). They’ve certainly looked after me. I want to write a third (Rosie) book and I want it to be the last book in the series.

“I want it to be about parenthood.

“I’m in the planning stage with it. I could sit down for 15 minutes with you and tell you the story.”

TWO STEPS FORWARD, GRAEME SIMSION AND ANNE BUIST, TEXT PUBLISHING, RRP $30, OUT OCT 2

JANE HARPER

JANE Harper’s mothers’ group is filled with professionally accomplished first-time mums in their late 30s. But even they didn’t realise an international literary star was in their midst.

They knew Harper as baby Charlotte’s mother, rather than the acclaimed author of crime thriller The Dry.

Harper says it was a “great moment” when they worked it out.

“We were talking about what we did when we weren’t mothers and I said, ‘I’ve written a book under the name Jane Harper’ because I was known to them as Jane Strachan. One of the other mums had literally just finished reading it.

“It was quite funny, she was amazed,” Harper says.

“And my hairdresser said something like, ‘Good luck with the book’ and her next client said, ‘Have you written a book?’ It turned out that she had just read it as well.”

17th Annual ABIA Awards. Jane Harper. Photo by Chris Pavlich

Meeting Harper, you get the impression she wouldn’t have been the one to bring the book up in either setting.

She doesn’t have to; everyone else is talking about the former journalist whose debut novel won a prestigious Victorian prize, sparked a fierce international bidding war and will soon be made into a movie by Reese Witherspoon.

The Dry has received dozens of other awards and copies of it are passed like a precious dog-eared gift between friends.

But Harper seems unfazed and says she rarely gets any attention when out in public.

Jane Harper’s The Dry.

Although paparazzi aren’t camping out the front, there’s no doubt life has changed markedly for Harper since she won the $15,000 Victorian Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Prize in 2015. Although she and husband Peter Strachan used the money for an overseas trip, Harper says it “took a while for the penny to drop”.

“The first inclination was the first offers from publishers. They were so enthusiastic about the book. It made me realise this may become something a bit bigger than I expected,” she says.

That’s an understatement. Harper is well into a three-book deal inked on three different continents.

The Dry has sold 150,000 copies in Australia and the international rights have been sold to more than 20 territories.

Jane Harper’s Force of Nature is being released on September 26.

Harper’s second book Force of Nature is bound to be just as popular. Like The Dry, it is an Aaron Falk mystery with crisp writing.

Her publishing deal enabled Harper to quit her job as a Herald Sun journalist in March 2016 when publicity and writing demands became too pressing.

It wasn’t a snap decision, Harper says.

However, having Charlotte in September 2016 made the biggest difference to her life.

“It has been a really busy year. Your baby comes first,” she says.

Harper is about to start publicity tours for Force of Nature, but manages the juggle thanks to hands-on dad Peter, her UK-based parents and two days of daycare.

“There’s a lot of swapping hats,” she says, laughing. “I am a mum and I am a full-time author — it’s two very different worlds.

FORCE OF NATURE, JANE HARPER, PAN MACMILLAN AUSTRALIA, RRP $33,
OUT SEPT 26

HANNAH KENT

HANNAH Kent says people she doesn’t know well are usually “very kind” when they find out she’s written a book.

“Sometimes they’ll even ask what it’s called and dutifully note down the title and say they’ll look out for it,” the Adelaide author says.

Kent appears to relish the discord between her low-key daily life and her literary profile as internationally acclaimed author of Burial Rites.

Author Hannah Kent is fast becoming one of Australia's most celebrated writers. Picture: Nicki Connolly

The book, published in 2013, has sold 400,000 copies in Australia, been published
in more than 30 languages and won a swag of international awards. US actor Jennifer Lawrence will star in the upcoming movie.

Kent spent her mid 20s enrolled in a creative writing PhD to accommodate her desire to be “writing as much as possible”.

And then the manuscript she wrote as part of her degree won the 2011 Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Award, and the international publishing world took notice.

“I stripped 20,000 words off the manuscript — most of them were adjectives — and put it in,” she says.

Kent says she was fortunate to win the $10,000 prize and the validation that came with it.

Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites.

“It was amazing because I was a uni student and I had moved back home to live with my parents. I immediately used the money for a bond and moved out,” she says.

The novel, about the last person executed in Iceland in 1829, was published as part of a two-book deal with Pan Macmillan reported to be worth $1 million.

“Well, it wasn’t that much, but it was much more than I had ever expected. It was a very healthy advance,” Kent says.

“I haven’t done a great deal with it.”

But she did buy a decent car with power steering and airbags — “something I’d wanted for a long time”.

Kent’s still got the same friends, she’s still close to her family and she’s still renting. Now it’s a townhouse she shares with a bulldog, a cat without a tail and her female partner.

The Good People by Hannah Kent.

The money did give her the freedom to defer her PhD, allowing her time to promote Burial Rites and write a second book, The Good People, released last year, a historical fiction novel set in Ireland in 1825. Like Burial Rites, it’s a dark and powerful book that leaves the reader breathless, turning pages late at night in a bid to inhale the essence of expertly drawn characters.

Kent likes to mix the solitary time she spends writing with freelance creative writing projects such as Kill Your Darlings, the literary journal she co-founded in 2010: “I couldn’t do that if I was working nine to five.”

A frisson of excitement surrounded the release of The Good People, which will also be made into a movie, but Kent says friends keep her grounded: “My friends are all incredibly accomplished ... This means I understand what I do is not more interesting or important than what they do.”

BURIAL RITES AND THE GOOD PEOPLE, ARE PUBLISHED BY PAN MACMILLAN AUSTRALIA