By Callum Ludwig
Author, screenwriter and producer Christian White is heading to Yarra Junction library for a Meet the Author event, somewhere he looks back on fondly.
The award-winning author’s father grew up in the area and he spent plenty of time visiting his grandparents who remained in the region.
Mr White said Yarra Junction still had the beautiful scenery and small-town charm he remembered from childhood Christmases.
“We lived in suburbia, so it would be like going to the country with the animals and wildlife. I remember walking with my sister and seeing a snake for the first time in real life. It was the coolest and scariest thing at the time,” he said.
“My strongest memory is of my grandparent’s house, and it changes so much, but it still has that small-town spirit that you just don’t get very often. I was supposed to attend an event there last year but had to cancel, and called up to apologise to them and my family there and they said ‘I just saw them at the RSL, I’ll pop over and let them know’. I’ll definitely set a book there, a fictional town based on Yarra Junction.”
Mr White’s debut novel, The Nowhere Child, won the 2017 Wheeler Centre Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Best Unpublished Manuscript and has been shortlisted for major awards including the Australian Book Industry Awards’ General Fiction Book of the Year and Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year, and the Indie Book Awards’ Debut Fiction Book of the Year since being published.
Mr White said he enjoyed the change of scenery that meet the suthor events gave him.
“Ninety per cent of my working life is spent in a room at my desk and behind the screen, it’s quite a solitary job. It’s a good experience to get out of the house and to meet readers is such a crazy privileged thing,” he said.
“When I first started to do them, I felt really nervous about the fact people are leaving their houses to see me and how I am going make it worth it, but I very quickly realised that everyone is a book nerd like me and these are my people, so it’s quite a pleasant experience.”
Mr White will be visiting Yarra Junction library at 1A Hoddle St, Yarra Junction on Tuesday 12 July from 2-3pm.
Mr White said it took many years for his dream to be realised.
“I wanted to be a writer since I was a little kid, and as soon as I got out of high school, I started thinking about it, always writing after hours and working casual jobs, but I wasn’t published until I was 37,” he said.
“Then everything just kind of happened in a terrific two or three-year period where it exploded, and I’m still kind of catching my breath. Sometimes I stop and look back at think ‘Is this really happening?’. It’s been a wild ride. Some articles described me as an overnight success, but I remember thinking ‘Wow, that was a 17-year long night.’”
Mr White has released three novels, co-wrote the feature film Relic, and co-created the television series Clickbait with Tony Ayres which went straight to number 1 on Netflix in 41 countries, including Australia, the US and the UK.
Mr White said his stories tended to be thrillers.
“All my books are thrillers or crime thrillers, Clickbait is a thriller and Relic is a horror. I like to dip my toe into horror because I love it, but mostly thriller,” he said.
“None of my stories is procedural or cop stories, they’re usually just things happening to ordinary people. They start from this kind of normal place and put everyday people put in horrific situations. It’s really very cruel, I take a normal, nice character and torture them basically.”
Following The Nowhere Child, Mr White released The Wife and the Widow in September 2019 in Australia and January 2020 in the US.
He published his third novel Wild Place on 26 October 2021, a story of a school teacher on holiday in 1989 who gets caught up in the mass hysteria of the Satanic Panic that swept the world throughout the 1980s and ’90s.
The event is free and open to all, but tickets must be booked at events.yourlibrary.com.au/event?id=29875
