TASWEEKEND: Vogel Award-winning author is made of the write stuff

Grief-stricken and pregnant, writer Kate Kruimink rushed home to Tasmania and soon set herself a super-ambitious goal.

SHE sounds like a superwoman: a rural Tasmanian author who popped out a real-life baby then created a fictional one and went on to win the ­nation’s most lucrative prize for unpublished young authors.

In her historical novel, A Treacherous Country, the real Kate Kruimink is in deep disguise, with a voice polished to the point of hilarious pomposity. She speaks through her protagonist, a bewildered 24-year-old Englishman on a mission in Van Diemen’s Land.

Gabriel Fox is an unmoored third son who finds purpose and momentum by translating his personal fixations into action. When we meet Fox, he has just travelled across the world in search of a woman transported to the colony as a teenager 30 years before.

Tasmanian author Katherine Kruimink is won the 2020 Vogel Literary prize. Picture: Chris Crerar

He thinks that if he finds Maryanne Maginn, it will endear him to a young woman he fancies back in England.

In person, the 33-year-old Cygnet author reveals herself as neither superwoman nor ­female fop. The winner of this year’s $20,000 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award is funny, candid about her periods of fragility and possessed of a fertile, even febrile imagination. Self-deprecation seems to run in her family: she uses her Dutch grandmother’s conjuring line to help people pronounce her surname: “Kruimink. Like a crow in a mink coat.”

Today the tall and striking author wears not fur but a red wool coat, donned for her hour-long commute to Hobart where she works part-time as an English language teacher at the University of Tasmania.

The well-travelled author met her husband Matthew in Rome six years ago. The couple went on to live in Jakarta, Sydney and Auckland. They were living in Melbourne when Kruimink fell pregnant with their daughter Edith, now aged two. Grief-stricken by the recent loss of her mother, Kruimink was thinking not about writing a novel, but getting back to her childhood home.

“My mum had died in 2017, a couple of months before I got pregnant. So it was a very, very intense time emotionally and we moved back here,” Kruimink says.

“I couldn’t deal with Melbourne pregnant and grieving, and all that stuff. I had to come home.”

The well-travelled author is happy to be living back in Tasmania. Picture: PETER MATHEW

hile the author says she has made up stories for as long as she can remember, she was hardly prolific on the page.

“I was never very productive,” she says. During and after university, Kruimink published a short story here and there every few years. She says most of her compositions failed to make it to the page, living only in her imagination.

“It all came to a head with this book and my daughter,” she says. “I realised I never appreciated the freedom I had ­before Edie. You can’t put yourself into an experience that you’ve never had before. Even if you’re a writer, you can’t viscerally live it. So [motherhood] was a bit of a shock to the system.”

She thought she would feel more grounded living back in Tassie, but it didn’t pan out that way at first.

Geography cannot solve everything.

“I felt lost in a way, which is kind of strange to say, because I was very tethered to the couch,” she says. “I didn’t realise what a sedentary experience [early motherhood] is. And so I found that [having a writing project] helped me to get out of the house.

“I could leave for an hour and I’d go to a cafe and write. Or I’d sit on the couch with Edie on the breast and type away.”

She was writing specifically to meet the deadline for the Vogel Award.

“Just left to my own devices, nothing gets done,” she says. “I’m better if I have something to work towards. And the deadline got me there in the end, through this haze of exhaustion.”

She met the cut-off date by a whisker with a manuscript that was just above the minimum 30,000 word count. “I allowed myself a little daydream [about winning] then I put it out of my head,” she says.

After finding out she’d won late last year, the rush was on to finish writing the novel in time for publication in April this year.

“I felt like half the book won the Vogel and ‘what about the other half?’ But I had the backstory in my head and it gave me time to get it down and the chance to fully realise the story.

“Without the backstory I think the main character’s motivation would be opaque.”

Indeed it remains boldly so for at least the first third of the novel, piquing tremendous reader curiosity about Fox’s motivations. Arriving in Hobart-town from Sydney is quite a culture shock for the young man, as Fox encounters a ragbag of charlatans, Jezebels, whalers and other waterfront fixtures.

Kate Kruimink says her main character, Gabriel Fox, is hiding insecurities behind florid prose. Picture: CHRIS CRERAR

In temperament, the young man is an anomaly, combining nervous wreckage with eccentric sanguinity. That’s lucky on the second count: Fox is so naive he stumbles into all sorts of fixes as he travels north on a stolen horse led by a wild-looking Irishman he calls the Cannibal. His saddleback luggage inlcludes two harpoons he won in a betting game that lost him most of his useful possessions and clothing.

“I had but little baggage, having been unfortunately divested of many of my trappings in Sydney through a confluence of mischance and my own poor judgment,” Fox narrates. “My reduced accoutrements were quite manageable by hand for a short distance, even with the harpoons.”

As Fox’s Tasmanian adventure unfolds, the backstory reveals more about her character’s posh but emotionally complex life back in the mother country.

Does he find Maryanne Maginn? You’ll have to read it to find out. And if you do, you are quite likely to find yourself laughing out loud. The author, who says she was exhausted almost to the point of delirium at times as she wrote, also had a lot of fun.

The passages where Fox narrates soiling a handkerchief during a bout of explosive food poisoning, abandons it then backtracks to the scene of the crime to retrieve the item is gold. After all, “Mama had edged and embroidered [it] with my initials in lovely and curling green thread”.

A Treacherous Country is published by Allen & Unwin, which has launched the careers of numerous emerging Australian writers since the prize’s inception.

The character of Maryanne Maginn was the seed from which Kruimink sowed her story. Inspired by Tasmanian history learnt during her UTAS ­arts degree, Kruimink first wrote about the woman she calls Maginn in a short story, which remains unpublished.

When she tried to ­return to the character as a novel protagonist she found herself channelling a different voice.

“This story came out of this guy who is very confused, because I was very confused,” Kruimink says.

“I think I tapped into my 25-year-old self and I basically just wrote her as Gabriel Fox on this adventure. So it’s almost a bit of a metaphor. In terms of voice, he’s hiding insecurities behind florid prose.”

Fox grapples with self-consciousness, and Kruimink says there have been times in her life when she has been unable to shake thoughts about the way she comes across to others.

“I’ve matured past that, to a degree, in that I’m a lot more comfortable with myself now and it doesn’t matter so much to me what other people think, but that is a core part of Gabriel’s journey and has been to me as well.”

Ah, the journey. Kruimink’s ride has been rocky at times. But here she is, a far cry from the Tassie teenager who was devastated by depression, insomnia and an eating disorder during high school, scoring a mere 15 marks in her TCE exams.

With a toddler in her arms and the Vogel in her hands – first awarded in 1980, it has launched the literary careers of ­authors from Tim Winton to Kate Grenville and Danielle Wood – Kruimink’s cup runneth over, as Fox might say.