Author who gave voice to animals in a pandemic wins $100,000 prize

It’s not unusual for Laura Jean McKay to be called prescient. After all, to have your novel about a pandemic come out while a coronavirus has the world in its thrall could be seen as perfect timing and her imagined world eerily familiar.

Now that acclaimed novel, The Animals in That Country, has won Australia’s richest writing prize, the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature. McKay also won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for fiction, worth another $25,000.

Laura Jean McKay subtly animalises the world in her distinctive prose.Credit: Brendan Lodge

Other winners on Monday evening were: Paddy Manning (Body Count: How Climate Change is Killing Us) in the non-fiction category; David Stavanger (Case Notes) for poetry; Angus Cerini (Wonnangatta) for drama; Cath Moore (Metal Fish, Falling Snow) for young adult; and Archie Roach (Tell Me Why) for Indigenous writing. They each receive $25,000.

Andre Dao won the $15,000 unpublished manuscript award for Anam, and Louise Milligan the $2000 people’s choice award for Witness.

When told about the big award on Monday afternoon so she could film a statement for the virtual ceremony, McKay asked organisers whether they were sure. “I’m wandering in a daze down the street to buy champagne,” she told The Age shortly after.

“To win in this year, which has been such a phenomenal year for fiction – a year when fiction has meant a lot to so many people during a pandemic ... I never would have thought it possible.”

On Sunday she and her partner, writer Tom Doig, had started to look to buy their first home together. “This award changes everything,” McKay said. “This morning we knew we had enough money to put down as a deposit, but we didn’t think we’d be able to pay our rent or buy food. We might have to rely on friends.”

McKay had the central idea of her book – a virulent virus that allows infected people to understand what animals are saying – 10 years ago. It follows Jean, a zoo worker, pursuing in the company of Sue, a dingo, her errant son who has snatched his daughter from his partner and fled south to commune with whales. Along the way the unusual pair encounter other species now able to give voice to their feelings.

But just when McKay started serious writing, she was bitten by a mosquito carrying chikungunya, which she says is like “dengue fever on crack”. She had polyarthritis for two years.

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“I feel like it infected the text, and the characters got sicker as I got sicker, and then it just started to take off on the page,” she said. “Suddenly everything that I was trying to do with the animal voices and the idea that humans might be able to understand what other animals were saying made sense and was just carried along by this disease.”

It had been horrible to release the book when there were millions of people suffering, she said, but interesting to see what she had got right or wrong, such as lockdown, masks and conspiracy theories.

“I’d been an aid worker and had responded in a communications way to things like Sars, so I had some idea about how a pandemic progresses,” she said. “So anyone who has written about a pandemic seems very prescient if they’ve got some of the details right, but actually they are just following a trajectory of the way that sort of disease goes.”

McKay, who now teaches at Massey University in New Zealand, said she tried to look at the animal world and other species in a different way.

“We’ve been the centre of everything for so long but now we’re starting to realise that what we’ve been doing to this planet isn’t OK and we have to start paying attention to the fact that there is an environment and an animal kingdom around and apart from us, and that’s really what this book is about,” she said. “It’s taking a step back and listening and looking and saying, what have we been thinking? Is what we’ve been thinking and doing right and is there another way to look at these other species?”

Andre Dao won the unpublished manuscript award for Anam, which he describes as a fractured family history.Credit: Luis Ascui

Andre Dao won the unpublished manuscript award, following in the footsteps of the national number-one bestseller, Jane Harper’s The Dry, which won the award in 2015. Other recent winners include Graeme Simsion, Maxine Beneba Clarke and Victoria Hannan. Dao described Anam as a fictionalised family history.

“It moves from 1930s Hanoi through to Saigon, Paris, Melbourne and Cambridge, and charts most of the 20th century into the 21st century through multiple wars and and displacements following a young man who is trying to make sense of that kind of fractured family history,” he said. “It’s concerned with memory, inheritance, colonialism, home and belonging.”

Dao is co-founder of Behind the Wire, an oral history project documenting people’s experience of immigration detention. Both his parents were refugees – his mother coming by boat to Australia, his father fleeing Vietnam for France.

“And the narrator’s grandfather and also my grandfather was in prison in Vietnam for 10 years as a political prisoner,” he said. “The plot revolves around that.”

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