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Dr Laura Jean McKay with her prize-winning novel about a pandemic (photo/Dr Kyra Clarke)
Now teaching creative writing at Massey’s Manawatū campus, Dr McKay is coming to grips with the “life-changing” success of winning the AU$100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature, as well as the AU$25,000 Fiction Award, announced in early February.
Her novel, in which a rogue virus gives infected humans the ability to understand animals, was up against shortlisted celebrated writers such as Richard Flanagan. While she defines the book – her first published novel – as “speculative fiction”, aspects of the pandemic theme turned out to be scarily accurate.