Her Award-winning Writing Career is a Story of Survival

- Fleur Guthrie

Author Bren MacDibble agrees that chapters of her own life have all the elements of a dramatic, action-packed novel.

There was the time the Australian-based Kiwi was almost killed when a truck clipped her car on an airport motorway, sending her vehicle flying into the median barrier.

And then there was the shock of watching the family home burning down in Melbourne and realising her two nearly completed manuscripts were still on her laptop, which was sitting on the kitchen table.

(Spoiler alert – a firefighter managed to save it.)

And then last year, the mother-of-two got the shock news her husband Ken (58) had broken his neck in a serious motorbike accident and had to be airlifted from the Outback.

Yes, The Nine Lives of Bren MacDibble could make a good read, says the 53-year-old, who was recently named a winner in the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults – but for now she’ll stick to writing dystopian ecological stories.

Chatting to the Weekly from Wellington, where her eco-drama The Dog Runner won the best junior fiction category, Bren says nearly losing her life and then most of her possessions inspired her and Ken to forge a simpler path.

Early last year, they decided to sell everything they had left and travel around Australia in a house bus with Basil, their “nutty little schnauzer”.

“It was kind of an opportunity that was forced on us after the fire,” tells Bren.

The couple were riding home after a weekend away when they turned down

This story is from the September 9 2019 edition of New Zealand Woman's Weekly.

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