Kirsty+Murray

Kirsty Murray was born in Melbourne on 21 November, 1960.

Kirsty Murray went to Brighton Beach Primary School in Melbourne and then went to Brighton High School for a few years.

When she was fifteen, her family moved to Toronto, Canada. There she attended Humberside Collegiate Institute.

Kirsty was the middle child in a family of seven kids.

When she was a child, Kirsty loved climbing trees and going on adventures. She also loved to read and visit the library.

Kirsty Murray is married to Ken Harper. She has three children and three step-children. They are called Ruby, Billy and Elwyn Murray and Isobel, Romanie and Theo Harper. They are all between 17 and 24 years of age.

Kirsty Murray has an old dog called Zenna that can sometimes act like a frisky dingo.

Kirsty doesn’t have a favourite colour. She loves yellow but has big red rugs in her living room. Her kitchen cupboards are blue and she has a big purple blanket on her bed. Kirsty loves colourful things in general.

Kirsty writes her books in her office at the bottom of the garden. Her office has big windows and a verandah along the front. When she is starting a book, Kirsty often works in her local library or in the State Library. She also sometimes uses private libraries, archives and museums for some of her research. She loves having piles of books around her as she writes.

It is not the length of a book that determines how long it takes to write. Some books just take longer than others.

Kirsty Murray always does a lot of research into her characters. She took a long time finding out about Ireland and the Irish people, when writing // Bridie's Fire //. She also learnt about what it is like to travel by sea, about early Melbourne, the goldfields, and 19th Century theatre.

When Kirsty was a child, she found it hard to come up with good ideas for stories because they were always fiction. To make it easier she started write non-fiction stories. Later, she realised that she could use real people and their stories as characters in her own novels. The stories are fiction but are often based on people she has met or heard about.

Kirsty doesn’t always start at the beginning. Sometimes a really good scene comes to her and she starts writing about that first. Then she figures out what should happen before and after that section.

Writing stories can be hard work because you have to sit down for a long time. Kirsty likes going for a walk as a good way to relax and give her body a break. Sometimes she just finds it hard to go back to writing when there are other things to do.