How to cope with a baby: write a novel and win the $20,000 Vogel Award

Kate Kruimink was looking for something to focus on. It was all very well to have a newborn daughter to look after, but what she needed was something to stop her "going up the wall". So she wrote a novel. "My daughter Edie was a poor sleeper, so I wrote with her in my arms."

Kate Kruimink's great aspirational hero is the novelist Hilary Mantel.Credit: Matthew Herbstritt

Now that novel, A Treacherous Country, has won this year's $20,000 Vogel Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript by a writer under the age of 35. The prize has served as the launching pad for the careers of novelists such as Tim Winton, Kate Grenville, Danielle Wood, Gillian Mears, Andrew McGahan and Rohan Wilson. Last year was only the third occasion the Vogel has not been awarded.

Kruimink's novel is set in 1840s Tasmania when Gabriel Fox arrives from Britain, having had to leave home in some distress. He is trying to find a woman, Maryanne Maginn, whose son is involved in the once-lucrative whaling trade.

Kruimink went back to a book she had started while studying at the University of Tasmania, thinking that might be the best way to distract herself, but found it too difficult to work on. Then something happened: "I found a side character and I found his voice and wondered what happened to him." What happened was that Fox became the heart of her first novel, written in eight months, which is published on Tuesday.

"As I went on I found he was more and more like me when I was 25 – confused, perhaps a bit cowardly, but ultimately meaning well and hopefully coming good."

A Treacherous Country by K. M. Kruimink.Credit:

Although one of her great writing heroes is Hilary Mantel, author of the acclaimed Thomas Cromwell trilogy – "she is an aspirational figure" – Kruimink takes a more organic approach. When it comes to research, she said she was aiming to strike a balance so nothing would be glaringly wrong nor would it be a distraction.

"I don't do maps or lists. Yes, I want it to be true, but I don't mind imagining character. I guess it was because I was quite imaginative as a child, always day-dreaming," Kruimink says. "I used to tell myself little stories in my head, and then eventually I moved on to have a strong interest in English, reading and writing."

She decided to use initials for her authorial name initially because of a "bit of cowardice, it was a bit safer to be K.M.," but she said both her mother and grandmother had been very literary and had shared the same first name so "it was a bit of connection for them".

So would she recommend writing a novel to new mothers? "Only if it's something that you've wanted to do specifically."