Tasmania is the “best place on Earth” – Fiona McIntosh

Author Fiona McIntosh believes Tasmania is “quite simply the best place on Earth”.

“I would live in Tasmania in a blink if my family didn’t live in South Australia,” she told Tasmanian Times.

Still, McIntosh has owned a home in the Huon Valley for the past twenty years, where she has written many of her novels, including her latest, The Soldier’s Daughter, a continuation of her 2020 novel The Champagne War. It follows Charlie and Violet Nash as they travel to Tasmania and set up a whisky distillery.

McIntosh was motivated to write The Soldier’s Daughter because many of her readers wanted to know what happened after The Champagne War.

“I held firm for six years on no sequel, but they [the readers] won,” she said.

“And once I met Kristy Lark-Booth, who is the daughter of the godfather of whisky in this country, I knew I had the beginnings of my lead character. She has been an enormous help.”

The Soldier’s Daughter was released on 30 September and is now available in bookstores and online.

Upping the challenges

Twenty-five years ago, McIntosh published her first book. Since then, she has written 46 more and become Australia’s seventh bestselling fiction writer of all time, with over a million copies sold.

She told Tasmanian Times that a mix of failure and competitiveness has kept her writing all this time.

“I don’t mean [I compete] with other writers, I compete with myself.

“Can I write two books a year? If I can, can I write three? I’ve written fantasy, so why not crime? So I write fantasy and crime, why not historical? I write historical and crime, so what about a children’s book?

“What about non-fiction [and] what about trying to write a screenplay? And so it goes. I just keep upping the challenges for myself. I change the goalposts every decade for a major challenge – right now that’s achieving screen.”

Prior to becoming a novelist, McIntosh was raising twin sons and running a major travel magazine. Then a mid-life crisis sent her “scurrying for something exciting to do that added more into an already packed life”.

“Something within [me] was needing a fresh challenge, something selfish and it turned out that I had a hankering to write a novel,” she said.

“I was so fortunate that my first attempt at a draft was picked up by a major publisher.”

Singing and dancing

Author Bryce Courtenay became a mentor to McIntosh when she attended one of his writing workshops in 2000.

The most important lesson he taught her was that being a successful commercial fiction writer requires a bit of singing and dancing.

“This really was shiny advice because writers often tend to be reticent; they like the idea of the ivory tower and writing quietly away from everyone,” McIntosh said.

“Bryce impressed upon me that this notion of quiet production is the tip of the iceberg. He made sure I understood that I needed public speaking skills, [that] I needed to be able to entertain a room or hold the attention of a group of people with an amusing anecdote or a quip. He reinforced that I needed to be able to talk to 300 or 30, be great on radio, larger than life on screen, bright and personable on a stage.

“He’s still right, and I give my masterclass attendees much the same advice because I’ve lived it and proved to myself that his words were not empty.”

Writing: “It doesn’t stop”

McIntosh told Tasmanian Times that she plans to keep writing – “it doesn’t stop”.

“I have just delivered a new crime featuring an Australian detective for 2027 and I am soon to finish the 2026 historical novel,” she revealed.

“In November, I’m travelling to London to begin research on the new Jack Hawksworth crime [novel] and to begin work on the 2027 historical [novel].”

McIntosh will also continue teaching masterclasses in writing and commercial fiction, something she has done since 2012.

Callum J. Jones is passionate about telling stories. He studied English, History, and Journalism at the University of Tasmania and lived in Western Sydney from 2022 to 2024 while working as a journalist for Professional Planner, a leading online publication for financial planners. Callum has written for Tasmanian Times since 2018 and has also been published in a range of other outlets, including Quadrant and the BAD Western Sydney anthologies.