But, it’s such devastating and harrowing material.

Because, on the one hand, you actually do want to show the horror that a fire like this can unleash. That was difficult, that was very difficult. Obviously, it is quite confronting, including detailing people, real life victims, succumbing to the fire, and I understand that you might have talked to some of the victim’s families. So, it’s hard to remember why you start a book in a particular place but that was the obvious place to me. Hearing about how they walked back through this uncannily expansive fire-zone to get to these very specific areas of origin, or the areas of confusion, as it turned out. They arrived on the Sunday after the fire and 30,000 hectares of plantation and state forest and private property had been burnt, yet they managed to walk through the fire zone and find these areas that are only about two to three square meters and I found that fascinating. I guess that’s what the Arson squad managed to do. How did you go about maintaining some semblance of order in describing something so innately chaotic and on such a grand scale? The first few pages of The Arsonist detail the actual fire itself. In addition to her creative non-fiction work, Hooper has also penned two novels – The Engagement and A Child’s Book of True Crime. It also took out the Ned Kelly aware for Crime Writing. Hooper never shies away from wholly conveying the unvarnished truth, by balancing the prosecution’s perspective with tracing Sokaluk’s own tragic provenance and life, ensuring a complete and completely immersive story.Ĭhloe Hooper garnered acclaim for her first true-crime book, The Tall Man: Life and Death on Palm Island, a title that netted her a slew of prestigious awards, including the Queensland, Victoria, West Australian and NSW Premier Literary Awards respectively. Largely depicted from the investigation of the Arson Squad and chronicling from the immediate wake of the blaze through to the apprehension of local outcast, Brendan Sokaluk and to the trial’s conclusion.

Chloe Hooper’s Explosive new True Crime book, The Arsonist, is founded upon the seemingly straight-forward question – what kind of person would deliberately start a fire? Told in Hooper’s inimitable, lyrical style, she seeks to answer such a question through the lens of the Black Saturday tragedy, a firestorm that devastated swathes of rural Victoria in 2009.

Chloe hooper the arsonist