Kingborough locals Kylie Carman-Brown and Tess Crawley have been announced as recipients of the 2025 Tasmanian Writers and Illustrators Mentorship Program.
This year 16 creators have been awarded mentorships, offering them the opportunity to work with an experienced author, illustrator or publishing professional to develop their project to a publishable standard.
Kylie will be using this program to polish up her historical magical realism novel draft, The Girl with the Green Fingered Heart, while Tess will be working on her dystopian young adult novel, The Deep.
“This program offers an invaluable experience for creators, providing an opportunity to develop their work with the guidance of established authors, alongside a supportive community of their peers,” Australian Society of Authors CEO Lucy Hayward said.
“Thank you to Arts Tasmania for partnering with us on the Tasmanian Writers and Illustrators Mentorship Program and helping us to nurture Tasmania’s incredible literary talent.”
Kylie of Blackmans Bay has plenty of experience as a historian, researcher, editor and mentor, but it wasn’t until her 30s that she started taking writing seriously.
The Girl with the Green Fingered Heart isn’t the first novel she has written, but it is her favourite, holding a very special place in her own heart.
It came after a tough period in Kylie’s life: she had lost her mother and shortly after her friend.
“It became a story on grief,” Kylie said of Green Fingered Heart.
“About how to recover from things you’d never wish on anyone.”
The novel features a neglected Victorian era garden with roses that talk.
The protagonist is named after Kylie’s friend.
As part of the mentorship program, the creators are provided a 20-hour mentorship with a mentor of their choosing.
Kylie will be partnered with Lee Kofman, Australian-Israeli author of eight novels, and a renowned writing coach.
“I’m most keen to learn techniques of being able to get through that very hard editing and polishing process without losing interest in the work,” Kylie said.
Kylie shared with the Kingborough Chronicle that she has a special writing ritual.
“When I was in Year 9 I won a little in-class competition from my English teacher,” she said.
“I still have my prize.
“It’s a carved stone egg on a stand and I pat that every time I go past it to sit down to write.”
Tess Crawley’s love of crime fiction is what resulted in her ending up as a psychologist.
“Years ago I met a senior crime officer and she told a story how she solved a particular case, and that met somewhere in the middle for me, crime fiction to an interest in the criminal mind,” she said.
Tess embarked on a psychology degree when was 25, with an initial focus on forensic psychology.
Now she is a clinical and forensic psychologist, as well as an author and business coach.
Tess said the idea to write a young adult novel was prompted by an article she read that asked the question, what do young people care about?
“In my mind I was thinking they care about what’s going on in the world, they’re angry with adults stuffing the world up,” Tess said.
“The next morning I had a fully formed idea for a novel.”
The Deep is set in a post global melt Tasmania in a tiny survivalist community.
The lead character is a 15-year-old free diver whose job is to salvage whatever useful things she can find in the ravaged remains of Hobart.
“She has a vision that predicts that there’s going to be a tsunami and it becomes a race against time to convince the adults who won’t believe her to do something,” Tess said.
Tess has two teenage sons who she bounced ideas off of.
“As the story has progressed and certain subplots have emerged in the story just getting feedback about if they want to know about that subplot has helped prioritise my own thinking about what young readers want,” Tess said.
She will be partnered with editor and publisher Kristina Schulz for the mentorship program.
