Nationality Australia Role Author Name Karen Nikakis | Genre Fantasy Period 2007-present | |
Occupation Novelist, lecturer in writing | ||
Karen Simpson Nikakis is an Australian fantasy author, writer and poet who lives at Melton, whose first fantasy novel The Whisper of Leaves (2007), has been described as an "impressive debut", with the National Library of Australia describing her first book as heralding "the arrival of an exciting new talent on the Australian fantasy landscape".
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Early life
Nikakis was raised in the central Victorian town of Mansfield, surrounded by the mountains of the Victorian Alps. Her interest in fantasy occurred at age 19, when she read Tolkien's fantasy epic Lord of the Rings. She has since written a number of published academic essays on myth and fantasy writing.
She has worked as a secondary teacher, TAFE teacher and lecturer in business communications at Deakin University. She completed a Master in Education in young adult literature with her thesis being on The Purpose of Dragons in Selected Children’s Literature in the Twentieth Century and went on to complete a Ph.D in 1997 in fantasy fiction from Victoria University with her thesis on The Use of Narrative in Order to Break the Masculine Domination of the Hero Quest.
Writing
During the 1980s she started writing picture story books, which she also illustrated.
Her first fantasy novel was published by Allen & Unwin in 2007 as The Whisper of Leaves, the first book in a fantasy series: the Kira Chronicles. A second book The Song of the Silvercades was released in July 2008.
In 2008 she was appointed the foundation head of the bachelor's degree in Writing and Publishing for Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE.