McKay, Laura Jean
Entry updated 6 November 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1978- ) Australian author whose very Near Future novel, The Animals in That Country (2020), which won the Arthur C Clarke Award, describes a planetary Pandemic whose most radical effect is an opening of the gates of Perception – and, it may be, actual language (see Communication; Linguistics) – between Homo sapiens and all the other citizens of Earth. After this "zooflu" hits, forcing many humans to wear masks and earplugs to fend off oceans of painful input from the entire world, a terrible awareness of the cost of life as previously enjoyed begins to disable human society, which will not survive unless it is fundamentally restructured. The language of the telling reaches moments of revelatory density. Some hope is offered of survival. Some of the stories assembled in Holiday in Cambodia (coll 2013) flirt unconvincedly with the magisterium of Fantastika; in its most memorable tales, Gunflower (coll 2023) further dramatizes the condition of the planet through intersections of "animal" and human. [JC]
Laura Jean McKay
born Orbost, Shire of East Gippsland [country of GunaiKurna people], Australia: 11 April 1978
works
- The Animals in That Country (Brunswick, Victoria: Scribe Publications, 2020) [hb/]
collections and stories
- Holiday in Cambodia (Collingwood, Victoria: Black Inc, 2013) [coll: pb/]
- Gunflower (London: Scribe UK, 2023) [coll: pb/]
links
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