Story by Sam Eyers
Cover Photo by Ryan Low
Pip Harry started her journey off as a magazine reporter for companies such as “TV Week” and “New Weekly”. She moved on to working for McDonalds and later Google in Singapore. She enjoyed her time at Google, and fondly remembered the snack draws they had; however, she felt that she was not fulfilled.
But all her life all she had wanted to do was write a book but struggled to gain any traction with publishers. For this reason, she returned to university, at age 30, to study fiction and to learn how to write an engaging book. She realised this was quite a hard thing to do. Pip received lots of rejections but finally had a break when one of her short stories was published in a magazine. Her first books were not very successful – mainly bought by a caring mother.
Her first break out novel was “Because of you” which became the turning point of her career. In 2017 The book – about the universal qualities of kindness and the power of writing – received many awards.
Prior to that; “Head of the River” was inspired by her experiences as a rower and her father winning the Australian championships six times. This inspired her story which details the journey of two superstar rowers Leni and Cristian Popescu who face a plethora of barriers that they must traverse to win the 2000m rowing race in six months’ time.
Recently she has been writing children’s books. “August and Jones” which is on the primary school NSW curriculum.
Pip has also started writing picture books and collaborating more. She is writing a new picture book called “The Inside Dog” which is illustrated by Carolyn Davis.
“Camp Spooky: Attack of the Aliants”, co-written with Kate Foster is coming out in a couple of months. Pip lamented that this book was very fun book to create because of the weird and preternatural ideas that stemmed from the joint brainstorming. Cowriting gave many benefits such as: she had to do half the normal work that would be required to formulate a book and for that book there were numerous ideas that had ranging perspectives.
Pip spoke about how collaboration is vital for creating a powerful story and that if you wanted to create a great novel one must spend ample time on the planning of it to ensure that it is a coherent and influential novel.
Her new book, “Drift” is coming out in July and is about bees swarming a character and this experience irreversibly changing him. Pip read the first chapter of her book and the personification of bees with an extended metaphor beautifully illustrating a picture in one’s head. The constant techniques that are littered throughout the chapter she read, create a warm and exciting book to read. The books name comes from bee-terminology as when bees drift, they move between neighbouring hives; this relates to Nathan, the main character, as he is moving from Australia to Tasmania. The creation of her characters and plotlines stems from her the time and effort she took to planning her novel.