Philip Armstrong lives in Lyttelton and teaches literature, creative writing and human-animal studies at the University of Canterbury. She is the ‘animal expert’ presenter on ABC Listen’s Animal Sound Safari. Laura is a lecturer in creative writing at Massey University with a PhD from the University of Melbourne focusing on literary animal studies. Her work appears in the Guardian, Best Australian Stories and the North American Review. Laura Jean McKay is the author of The Animals in That Country (2020) and Holiday in Cambodia (2013). Philip Armstrong and Laura Jean McKay Photo: WORD Christchurch About the speakers Laura Jean McKay The protagonist – aghast – in a gradual way, starts to realise what the animal is saying, and it’s often not very pretty.īut it is very astonishing in literary terms. What the virus in the novel does is enable you to be more sensitive to the chemicals, and the body language, and the pheromones, and the vocalisations, and the gestures, and smell of animals’ urine markings, and these things come together in a most extraordinary way.

She knows, and we know that animals don’t, can’t, and will never, speak like us. We can think of animals talking if we’re reading Richard Adams or kids books, and there are people like Barbara Gowdy who have narrated serious novels from the point of view of animals, as if animals think and speak like us.īut Laura Jean doesn’t do that.

The protagonist, having caught this ‘flu (which does something to your cognitive abilities, and enables you to understand animals) – you know, that’s a hard sell for a reader. Professor Philip Armstrong of the University of Canterbury Photo: University of Canterbury

Holiday in cambodia laura jean mckay