Ever since she could pick up a pencil, Aranda-based author Karen Viggers says she has been writing. 

“I always wanted to write a novel, but then it was after having my two kids that I decided it was time to make it happen,” she says. 

“I was coming up to 40 and I thought, well, if it doesn’t happen now, I’ll be 80 saying I’m going to write novels.”

Despite having now published five books, Karen says she keeps herself “in the real world” by maintaining her career as a vet on a part-time basis. 

“I like having those two sides of my mind,” she says. 

“I have a strange flip from the emotional and the creative to the diagnostic thinking, not saying you don’t think when you’re creative, but it flips to a different space where all emotion is set aside and you can think in a more mathematical and logical way about pathways to diagnosis and stuff like that. 

“I can feel the switch when I have to flick from one thing to the other.”

Karen says that like most authors, she draws a lot of material from life.

“Each of my novels have been something that I was interested in, or concerned about, or was burning for me at the time that I wrote it,” she says.

“I never want to be didactic in my writing, I want to explore different viewpoints and explore an issue and explore humanity and the challenges that we all face. 

Her latest novel, Sidelines, came from 14 years of being a soccer mom, she says, and the interesting things she would see in other watching parents. 

“I didn’t completely dig into that Australian obsession with sport, but this focus on winning and imposing that pressure on kids, and then using sport as a lens to look at parenting and modern society, that’s where the whole thing came from,” she says.

Karen has recently returned from a self-funded promotional tour around Australia for Sidelines, which was published in January and it is currently being translated into French, as Karen has become somewhat of a celebrity there. 

“My best-selling book in Australia and internationally was The Lightkeeper’s Wife, which was my second novel,” says Karen. 

“It was picked up by a small but good French publisher… they published it, and it was beautiful. 

“It was the silhouette of a lighthouse and they changed the title to something that was more appropriate for a French audience, and the book just went great guns over there.

“The publisher was really passionate about it and she really got behind it, and then a French bookseller picked it up and he was like the Oprah of French books, and went on TV France and said, ‘this was one of the top 10 books of the summer’.” 

Karen only discovered her French fame after being hashtagged into somebody’s post in France about her ‘being a small miracle’. 

“Nobody told me it sold a hundred thousand copies in a month.”

Karen speculates her popularity in France comes from the French love of the wild Australian landscape, which often plays a central role in her novels.

It is a passion she shares with them, she says, crediting her upbringing on a small farm in the Dandenongs as the origin for her connection with nature. 

“I used to lie in the paddock with the cows coming around and licking my gumboots and hands,” she says.

“Then when I got a horse I used to ride everywhere, miles and miles on my horse, alone.”

She says she also suspects the philosophical questions she poses in her novels draw in the French audience. 

“Most of my books hover over some sort of issue, even this latest one, Sidelines, hovers around parents living vicariously through their kids and how that affects kids in terms of mental health and enjoyment of sport and ongoing participation,” she says. 

“It’ll be interesting to see how it goes when it comes out over there, it’s been a while between books with covid and a few deaths in the family and things like that. 

“Hopefully they haven’t forgotten me.”

karenviggers.com