Kaaren has always loved stories and aspired to become an author from as early as fourteen, when she endeavoured to write the eighth Chronical of Narnia. She made excellent progress to almost a hundred pages, when her father reclaimed his typewriter and her mother said she needed the family dining table back. Showing vivid imagination, her short story Fever Pitch won the Sixth Form category of the inaugural Canberra Times short story competition.
Side-tracked by a career in the Australian Public Service, where she wrote long analytical reports, Kaaren didn’t write creatively until 1995, when she accidentally completed a novel while on maternity leave. Her works received attention from small independent publishers, and between 1998 and 2006 five novels and three children’s stories were published. The third book in her second fantasy series was runner-up in the fiction category of the ACT Publishing Awards in 2006. She also self-published a non-fiction book, which sold two print runs.
In 2005 Kaaren was diagnosed with breast cancer, and in 2006 her publisher closed down. Talk about timing! In a change of lifestyle, Kaaren hung up her creative keyboard and left the public service to become a freelance editor. She became an Accredited Editor with the Institute of Professional Editors (IPEd) in 2012.
A mad keen sportswoman, Kaaren has been a long-distance runner, a horse rider and more recently a dragon boat paddler. She also likes to walk, swim and kayak. In 2017 she and her husband Andrew moved to the South Coast of NSW. This proved to be a more challenging change than anticipated due to the bushfires over summer 2020 followed by successive lockdowns due to the pandemic. In 2021 Kaaren discovered her breast cancer had returned in her spine … However, every cloud has a silver lining and Kaaren used the extra time in her recovery from major surgery to return to her passion of writing — and The Mage and the Bird Caller trilogy came to life.
