A Wreck of Seabirds by Karleah Olson
A Wreck of Seabirds by Karleah Olson is shortlisted for the 2025 CBCA Book of the Year: Older Readers.
Congratulations on A Wreck of Seabirds being shortlisted by the CBCA, Karleah.It’s the best YA novel I’ve read in ages. And thank you for speaking to Joy in Books at Paperbark Words blog.
Author Interview: Karleah Olson
Where are you based and what’s your background in the literary world?
I am Perth based. I wrote A Wreck of Seabirds as part of my PhD thesis at Edith Cowan University. I submitted the manuscript to the Fogarty Literary Award in 2023 and it made the shortlist, and ultimately got published from there, which has been a fantastic experience.
Your writing is excellent. How have you learned to finesse it?
Thank you! I have been a writer as long as I can remember, so it is definitely a long-practiced skill for me. I attended writing programs when I was in high school, and studied Creative Writing alongside English Literature at ECU. It’s always been my great love! Being a big reader is also important for any writer, I really think they go hand in hand.
A Wreck of Seabirds is the perfect title. Where did it come from? How did you choose it?
The title is one of my favourite aspects of the novel. I was playing around with a few other working titles and they didn’t quite fit, and I started thinking of collective nouns and looked some up and came across ‘a wreck of seabirds’ and I just loved the way that sounds. It fit the manuscript I had so far at the time so well, there were already a lot of birds mentioned in the story, and I just felt like the title really matched the tone of the story I was telling.
What’s the story behind it being classified as an adult then YA novel?
To me this is more a marketing thing that came up at the publishing stage. I didn’t write Wreck intentionally as either adult or young adult, but I do feel like it occupies that in-between space quite nicely. It was originally published as fiction so it was more easily marketable to both adult and younger readers, and the YA edition was released in line with the book being shortlisted for the CBCA Book of the Year Awards, which was incredibly exciting!
What genre/s is the novel? What atmosphere are you creating?
It is a work of Australian Coastal Gothic Fiction. I wanted it to capture the atmosphere of the WA coastline, especially the more isolated areas where the landscape really dominates your surroundings. There’s always been something beautiful, constant, but also wild and unpredictable about the sea to me, so I wanted that to come through strongly in this novel.
How does the setting and weather impact your story?
I would say the setting is the most important aspect of the story. I have always loved the way Australian writers wrote landscape, and working with a coastal setting to tell a gothic story was the starting point of this creative endeavour. I wanted it to really be a love letter to the coastal landscape I grew up with. I had the setting well before I knew what the narrative would be. I was trying to write something gothic, so the weather being wild and moody just fit best. I also love the idea of taking a landscape that in people’s minds is always sunny and picturesque, and using the flip side of that when it’s darker and more volatile, because the coast is different in its different seasons. I wanted to showcase that.
I love your repeated chapter headings: The Shore, The Shallows, The Deep. How do they correlate with your plot?
I love how this came together, too. The narrative plays around with time a little bit on the way these stories are told and interwoven. The idea behind the chapter headings was that the further out to sea you get, the further back in time you are. So The Shore is our ‘present day’ narrative with Briony and Ren, The Shallows steps back a few years to Aria and Sarah’s story, and The Deep is about a decade back and tells the story of young Ren and his little brother Sam. The short chapters alternating these three narratives is supposed to feel a bit like you’re being pulled in and out of the stories and in and out of time. I think it imitates the ebb and flow of the tide really well, like you’re being pulled out to sea and back as a reader.
Why is one character reading a Secret Seven book?
I just wanted to include something I would have read as a kid, and I think those books are timeless! I have always been an avid reader, and as a child I read a lot of Enid Blyton. It’s just a little nod to my bookworm childhood I suppose.
Could you please introduce your major characters? What do you love about some of them?
To me, Briony and Ren are the protagonists of this story. So we start with Briony, who comes across Ren at the start of the novel in a bit of emotional turmoil and approaches him. Briony has had her own share of difficult emotions to navigate and sees something familiar in Ren. The thing I love most about Briony is that to me she is so fiercely hopeful. Ren is a bit more haunted, especially in this setting. He has come back to a town where the worst experience of his life unfolded, and he’s really struggling to navigate that. He also carries a lot of difficult feelings surrounding his father. I adore Ren, I think my favourite thing about this character is that he does have these big, quite confronting feelings about things, but he’s very unapologetic about them. He feels what he feels and that’s ok. A big part of this is his struggle to hold so much anger and blame with his father for what happened to Sam. Ren acknowledges that he knows it isn’t fair to feel this, but that he does anyway. I think that’s a really big thing, because as humans we can’t help how we feel, we can only help how we carry and process those emotions, and how we act.
Why have you shown such strong sibling bonds?
I have two siblings, and I think there’s something really special about those relationships. It’s such a unique thing to grow up with someone in such a close environment, and share experiences, and independently grow into the people you want to be. It’s a relationship that I think would be devastating to lose, and I don’t know how you come back from that sort of loss. Briony and Ren’s losses in this story are both siblings, in different ways, and their absence haunts them both. I also wanted to include some positive, healthy sibling bonds with Briony and Mike. I really love this relationship, and wanted to show them hold on to each other a bit tighter through the absence of their missing sister Sarah.
We learn of Briony’s physical attraction to Ren through descriptions of him through her eyes. Why have you focused on her attraction to him rather than his of her?
I wanted Ren to reflect the surrounding landscape a little bit, in that he was beautiful but that wasn’t really the point. It’s the darkness and the emotion that really made his character. I wanted Briony to feel this physical attraction to him quite consistently, but lean into getting to him on an emotional level first, because that’s what they both needed. They each needed a person whose experiences were similar enough to relate to, but different enough to offer new perspectives and support.
I was also playing on the idea of ‘lure’, I did a lot of research on mermaid, siren, and selkie mythology in the early days of writing this, and those fantasy elements didn’t end up having a place but the concept of lure definitely did. I wanted these characters to be drawn to and held by this place, but Briony is also drawn Ren in a lot of ways, and physical attraction is a very strong draw to another person.
I think I avoided writing Briony the same way through Ren because I wanted to know him through his past, and more through The Deep chapters where we come to know his childhood. The way I saw it, Briony was in this place struggling with the future, and being hesitant to pursue a new relationship despite obvious physical attraction was a part of that. She does want him, but she doesn’t know yet how to move forward and on from this town. Ren is the opposite, in that he is in this place struggling with the past. So the way we get to know Ren is through looking back and getting to know his ghosts, and that’s in his family history and experiences.
Why did you risk such a dramatic opening scene?
I didn’t really ever think of it as risky, but this opening scene is the very first thing I had of the novel. I had spent months researching different concepts, and reading a lot of Gothic and Coastal fiction, and I still had no idea what the story was. I was out on a walk one day and this scene just flashed into my head, of this young woman running along a coastal track and seeing a young man in the water struggling with something. I felt a bit like Briony did in that moment, I just had to know who he was, what his story was, and what put him there in the water. The story really unfolded from that moment.
Hope or closure?
This is a tough one because I really don’t know. I have thankfully never experienced anything like Briony and Ren have, but I lean towards closure being preferable. That said, there are a lot of true crime and missing persons cases where I’m sure the answers are so awful it might be kinder for a family not to know them. This was a big question in Wreck I suppose because Briony has hope and Ren has closure, but I don’t think either of them are better off for it. It’s awful either way, and they deal with their losses regardless because they have to. I don’t think there’s an answer here, just that we learn to handle what is dealt to us in our own way.
What impact has being nominated as a CBCA shortlisted book had on you and/or the novel?
The CBCA shortlisting was such a wonderful surprise! It’s been incredible, and Wreck has reached so many new people and places because of it. It’s really given me confidence as a writer that I can dedicate time to this craft and it means something. It can be hard at times making the choice to dedicate time to something creative, because it really is a labour of love, and in a lot of ways you end up spending a lot of time justifying doing something that might not go very far. So it’s very validating to see this novel have an impact on others.
What is one way you could suggest the book being used or shared in schools?
I think there’s a lot of symbolism, a lot of hard topics up for debate, and also a lot to work with in terms of the narrative structure. I also love how well it demonstrates the idea of a setting almost being a character in a novel, so that could be a good thing to focus on and have students write a short story or something that relies on the setting as much as, or even more than, the plot.
What are you writing now or next?
I am working on my second novel, which is a little in the same realm as Wreck but not related at all. It’s definitely still Australian Coastal Gothic, and a bit darker. I’m really leaning into the research I did at the beginning of my PhD, and this novel is inspired by selkie mythology. It will play a bit more on the weird side of the Gothic.
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