Soldier. Police officer. Scientist. Now David Kernot writes full time from an off-grid property in South Australia’s Barossa Region, crossing contemporary fantasy, science fiction, climate fiction, crime thrillers, and horror.
His eighty-plus short stories span Australia, the US, Canada, and the UK. Latest release: The Seventeenth.
The medium version
Before he was a novelist, David Kernot was a soldier, a South Australian police officer, and a defence scientist. These days he writes full time from an off-grid property in the Barossa Region, moving easily between contemporary fantasy, science fiction, climate fiction, crime thrillers, and horror. His short stories have appeared more than eighty times in anthologies across Australia, the US, Canada, and the UK.
Ideas travel with him from the 23 countries he’s visited, and threads of permaculture and life’s origins in the universe run through novels and his short story collections including Gaia’s Guardians, and Maralinga Winds, but The Seventeenth and the forthcoming second crime novel in the same series was from his policing experiences.
The full story
David Kernot has lived a few lives before this one: twenty years in uniform as an Australian Army soldier and a South Australian police officer, then a long stretch as a defence scientist, before he finally sat down to write full time. He now lives completely off-grid in South Australia’s Barossa Region, a landscape that turns up again and again in his fiction.
He writes across genres rather than settling into one: contemporary fantasy, science fiction, climate fiction, crime thrillers, and dark fiction and horror. Readers who like their stories to cross the line between what’s real and what isn’t will find plenty here, from a farmhand who steps through a crystal amulet into a medieval kingdom, to a near-future Australia where three family emeralds carry a magic of their own, to a quiet country town hiding a monster in plain sight.
His short fiction has appeared more than eighty times in anthologies and magazines across Australia, the US, Canada, and the UK, and he holds nine Honourable Mentions from the Writers of the Future contests. His novels include The Seventeenth, Gaia’s Guardians, Maralinga Winds, Not Like Us, Gateway Through Time, and Beam Rider, along with several short story collections going back to his 2013 debut, The Early Years.
David has visited 23 countries across four continents, and travel, permaculture, and questions about how life began in the universe all find their way into his fiction, one way or another. For more, including where to find his books, visit davidkernot.com.