Ahead of She Kilda 2011, the Australian Women Crime Writers’ Convention, the Wheeler Centre welcomes some of Australia’s leading crime writers. They discuss why there’s such an appetite for women’s crime writing. Honey Brown, Lindy Cameron, Kerry Greenwood and Angela Savage - four writers at different stages of their careers - discuss all things criminally unladylike.
Featuring
Kerry Greenwood
Kerry Greenwood is the author of the Phryne Fisher and Corinna Chapman series of crime novels, as well as a large number of plays and books in a variety of genres and categories.
Kerry was born in Footscray, studied English and works as a Legal Aid lawyer. She has been a playwright, folk-singer, factory hand, director, producer, translator, costume-maker and cook.
Her first book, Cocaine Blues, a murder mystery set in the 1920s, was published by McPhee/Gribble in 1989. The elegant and irrepressible sleuth, Phryne Fisher, has since returned almost annually.
Kerry has contributed to many anthologies including Dale Spender’s Weddings and Wives. She has also published a history of the Springvale Legal Service called It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time (MUP 1994).
Kerry co-authored a cookbook and detective story pastiche called Recipes for Crime (1995) with Dr Jenny Pausacker, as well as a book of essays on female murderers called The Thing She Loves: Why Women Kill.
Kerry’s YA fiction includes the fantasy novel, The Broken Wheel (winner of the Aurealis Award for best Young Adult Science Fiction in 1996), Whaleroad, Cave Rats and Feral (a notable CBC listing).
Kerry edited On Murder and On Murder 2 as well as a 1918 diary, A Different Sort of Real: The Diary of Charlotte McKenzie (an Honour book in CBC Book of the Year 2002). Her first young reader’s crime novel, The Three Pronged Dagger, won a Davitt Award, and was followed by the sequels The Wandering Icon and Danger Do Not Enter.
In 2004 Kerry began a new detective series, featuring contemporary baker-sleuth Corinna Chapman. Kerry’s work has been recognised with a Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award.
Honey Brown
Honey Brown lives in country Victoria, Australia, with her husband and two children. She began writing in 2000 and is the author of six critically acclaimed novels. Her first novel Red Queen was published to critical acclaim in 2009 and won an Aurealis Award, and The Good Daughter was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis Award in 2011.
Active and a keen bushwalker, a life-changing blow came for Honey in her late-twenties when she was involved in a farm accident. The resulting spinal injury left her confined to a wheelchair. Honey turned to writing as a way back from the trauma and the depression that followed.
Candid about the tough road back from acquiring a disability, Honey now focuses her energy on writing, traveling with her family and engaging in the promotional side of being a popular novelist.
Lindy Cameron
Lindy Cameron is the author of the Bryn Gideon and Kit O'Malley series as well as true crime. Before plunging into the world of make-believe, Lindy worked as a journalist and a book editor. She also wrote some primary school history texts and a card game book for kids.
Lindy is an Australian writer of crime fiction and true crime who long ago gave up the fantasy of growing up to be a famous scientist. Lindy’s latest fiction is the adventure thriller Redback, featuring the very cool Bryn Gideon and her team of retrieval agents.
Lindy’s first published novel was the archaeological adventure Golden Relic. Her second novel, Blood Guilt, and its two sequels featuring Melbourne PI Kit O’Malley, Bleeding Hearts and Thicker Than Water, have been published in the US by Bywater Books. Lindy is currently working on the sequel to Redback and a young adult urban fantasy time-travelling adventure.
She is a founding member of Sisters in Crime Australia, and has been a national co-convenor of and editor of the group’s magazine, Stiletto, for nearly two decades.
Recently she has written and commissioned anthologies of true crime. She is therefore also the contributing editor of Meaner Than Fiction and Outside the Law 2 and editor of Outside the Law 3. With her sister, Fin J. Ross, she co-wrote Killer in the Family and she is also co-author, with Ruth Wykes, of Women Who Kill.
In 2010 Linda launched Clan Destine Press with Kerry Greenwood’s historical novel, Out of the Black Land, her own Redback, and Dougal’s Diary by David Greagg.
Angela Savage
Angela Savage is an award-winning writer, former CEO of Writers Victoria, and current CEO of Public Libraries Victoria. Her debut novel, Behind the Night Bazaar, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Unpublished Manuscript ...