Karen is a Melbourne-based author for middle grade and young adult readers. Penguin Random House Australia published her debut duology, Time Catchers – When Days Tilt and When Souls Tear – in 2021 and 2022. These historical fantasy adventures are set in Victorian London and a parallel city. Karen is represented by Danielle Binks.

Karen self-published ahead of the curve at the age of ten in her home town of Perth in Western Australia. Since A Horse Named Ginger was released, Karen has been variously employed as a freelance copywriter, a marketing director for Paramount Pictures in London, a grain weighbridge operator in rural WA, a swimming teacher, a life model, a deckhand in Chile and an English teacher in Japan. She’s also taught creative writing and dance.

She’s interested in looking at old stories in new ways, and in stories that explore diverse or historically silenced voices. She’s found that the strange and tilted never seem to be far from the surface.

Other things she cares about:

• The everyday miracle of nature, of which we are custodians. Trees, especially – the bigger the better, without wanting to appear size-ist. The deep importance of approaching land as kin, not as resource.
• Walking – in Big Mama Nature, of course, but also as a flaneur – a wanderer and discoverer of cityscapes and other places.
• Dancing, all kinds.
• Travel, both far and near. It’s not always about distance, but about how you immerse yourself in wherever you are.
• Journeys into other lives, also known as reading. The importance of story and of imagining this world anew.

Karen also runs a niche tour operator business with her husband, who is a Londoner, and lives in Melbourne with him and their two Anglo-Australian children. And two cats.