Laree Chapman: Author

Growing up on a remote island in Bass Strait helped shape Laree Chapman’s perspective on life. She knows family is everything, isolation isn’t always paired with despair, and being alone doesn’t necessarily equate to loneliness. Not with a thousand tales to tell, and a handful of attentive sheep dogs who love a good yarn. Those early years honed both her resilience and her storytelling skills.

Laree returns to those early themes of isolation and resilience through her writing. Her youth on remote islands and distant outback sheep stations both inspire her work. Her Historical Crime series, Hawker’s Road, is set in outback Queensland in 1886. She dips into her rich Irish ancestry and subsequent travels through India to explore the lives of her characters as they struggle with the hardship of life, and violent death, on an isolated sheep station.

Laree’s parents, Jack and Marietza, cheerfully inoculated her with a deep love of literature and verse…and cowboy books. While she cut her writing teeth on short stories and poetry at the vibrant Bundaberg Writers Club, she delved deeper to write the Hawker’s Road series. Hawker’s Road: The Hangman’s Noose was awarded second place in the 2021 CYA ‘Everything’s A Genre’ competition in the Historical Fiction category.

In between writing longer work, she gets a high writing short stories and poetry. Laree has gained success in multiple competitions with these. She has also judged performance poetry for the Queensland Writers Centre in Rockhampton and visited primary schools dressed as a pirate… aargh.