Yes, crime does pay, just ask Christian White and his Nowhere Child
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Attention all struggling writers: please raise a glass to Melbourne man Christian White. At 37, after more than 15 years of working odd jobs – as an apple picker, golf buggy driver, call centre operator, and editor of porn videos – he’s scored a six-figure, two-novel publishing deal for his debut novel, The Nowhere Child, after winning last year’s $15,000 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript.
Persistence pays off for emerging Victorian novelist Christian White.
Photo: Kristoffer Paulsen
With advances for most books crashing in Australia, few novelists are able to make a full-time living from their craft. Fewer still crack the big time with sales of TV rights. White has managed both: a mini-series based on The Nowhere Child was recently announced.
“It’s been phenomenal,” says White, who grew up on the Mornington Peninsula, the youngest of four children to parents he describes as hippies. “I’ve dreamed of being a writer since I was kid, and in my early 20s made it my life’s ambition. I didn’t really have a plan B.”
The “nowhere child” of the title refers to Melbourne photography teacher Kim Leamy, whom a US investigator believes is really Sammy Went, a two-year-old who disappeared from her small-town home in Kentucky in the US 28 years previously.
White’s break-out success is part of the recent mini boom in Australian crime fiction, driven by Jane Harper’s The Dry and Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies. Observes White, “Audiences are looking for something different, and Australia is unique in so many ways.”
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