Large tracts of the book were written using voice-to-text recognition technology it was too painful for McKay to use a keyboard. And out of that I started to write this novel that’s when the disease started to really take off on the pages – as it was taking off in my body.” “I felt like I was turning into a mosquito and I was having these very strange hallucinations. She told The Guardian “I was living with this strange disease and it just started to infect my book,” adding that “It gives you a sort of polyarthritis and I couldn’t move very well for about two years. The idea came to her during a prolonged battle with chikungunya virus – a mosquito-born disease she describes as “dengue on crack” – which she contracted while attending a writers’ festival in Bali. The work centres around a “zooflu” epidemic that enables its infected victims to communicate with animals. She began writing the novel six years before the world had heard of Covid-19. Mckay is currently residing in New Zealand, where she has been lecturing in creative writing at Massey University for the past 18 months. She also won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for fiction, worth another $25,000.
Dr Laura Jean McKay took the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature for her debut novel, The Animals in That Country.
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