Sara Douglass
I can't remember learning to read, or picking up my first
book. I have always read, and I have always loved books. I
was born on a small farm some twenty-five miles out of
Penola in South Australia. It was called
Gundealga, 'peaceful watering hole', and its names, and its
woods and deer, are remembered in The Axis Trilogy. The
farm had no electricity, so I remember reading my first
books by the gentle glow of kerosene lamps, hiding behind
the living room couch so my parents would think me already
in bed.
When I was about seven we moved to Adelaide, and somehow
the household books bred in the process. I remember my
father nonchalantly propping up a bucket to catch the drips
from a leaking roof with seventeenth-century volumes that
he said were so mouldy anyway they wouldn't mind a bit of
extra dampness (I was horrified. I rescued them and
carefully dried them out and now they rest, splotched and
blotched but still readable, on the mantelpiece above the
fire in my writing room).
I started writing as soon as I felt competent, about nine
or ten, and my teachers and parents regarded me
indulgently, as if to say, "She'll grow out of it". But I
didn't. I kept writing. When I was about fourteen I
received second prize in a nation wide essay competition.
When I left school my writing ceased for some six to seven
years as I got involved in the world -- My first career was
as a nurse.
An escape finally presented itself when I applied to do
a Bachelor of Arts at Adelaide University. Suddenly I found
myself back in a world that encouraged creative thinking
and processes. I was enthralled. I started writing again by
keeping a detailed diary. I found myself a new career as
an academic, teaching medieval history at La Trobe
University, Bendigo. This new job I found incredibly
stressful, and so, just for myself, no-one else, I began to
write in the evening and weekends. I loved it! Writing
became for me the perfect way to relax and escape the
stressful world of academia. I never thought of writing fantasy until one day ... one
day when I just sat down and started writing BattleAxe. I
knew almost immediately that this was going to be my best
chance at getting published. I wrote virtually the entire
trilogy, thought about it, and then sent BattleAxe off one
day to an agent.
I knew that I would have my best chance with an agent. I
picked up the Melbourne Yellow Pages, and looked under
agents. — Australian Literary Management was picked
because they had the magical word 'literary' in their
name. And so off it went and here I am, all due to the
intervention of a tiny iron axe that gave me the idea for
BattleAxe and the help of the Melbourne Yellow Pages.
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Series
Books:The Devil's Diadem, November 2012
Paperback / e-Book
The Devil's Diadem, August 2011
Hardcover
The Infinity Gate, June 2009
Darkglass Mountain #3
Hardcover
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