"one of the most important writers of the beginning of this century"
(Gérard Collard, books commentator on France TV)
About
Karen Viggers is a novelist, veterinarian, adventurer, and co-host of the Secrets From the Green Room podcast. She loves climbing mountains and fording streams all over the world. She is passionate about nature and wildlife, and has worked with all kinds of Australian native animals, including possums, penguins, pythons and seals.
Karen is the author of five internationally bestselling novels: The Stranding (2008), The Lightkeeper’s Wife (2011), The Grass Castle (2014), The Orchardist’s Daughter (2019) and Sidelines (2024). Her novels have been translated into several languages and have enjoyed great success in France where she won the Les Petits Mots des libraires literary award in 2016 for her novel La memoire des embruns (The Lightkeeper’s Wife) which reached No 1 on Amazon and was on the French bestseller list for 47 weeks.
Karen’s work is set in Australian landscapes and communities, and explores contentious social and environmental issues such as dying with dignity, displacement of First Peoples, wildlife conservation, clear-felling of native forests, and modern parenting. Her work also has been published in the Griffith Review, and in Animals Make Us Human (eds. Meg Kenneally & Leah Kaminsky).
She is co-host of the Secrets From the Green Room podcast in which she interviews writers and other book industry colleagues about books and writing. She has interviewed numerous high-profile Australian authors including Charlotte Wood, Sofie Laguna, Amanda Lohrey, Pip Williams, Heather Rose, Jock Serong, Shankari Chandran, Markus Zusak, Nardi Simpson, Anita Heiss, and many others.
Karen is a regular public speaker at literary festivals, lunches, writers centres, libraries, book clubs, schools and community groups.
She has been a grateful recipient of artist residencies at Bundanon (Boyd Trust) and Varuna, The National Writers House. She was a visiting fellow at the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences in 2024, and she was a Board Member of the Canberra Writers Festival from 2019-2022.
Outside of writing, Karen works as a veterinarian in small animal practice. She has worked in many wild places in Australia, donating her time and skills as a veterinarian to support field studies on Australian wildlife.
She lives on unceded Ngunnawal and Ngambri land in Canberra with her ecologist husband.