THE day before winning Australia's top literary prize for unknown authors with his first novel, Launceston writer Rohan Wilson pitched his second to the head of publishing at Allen & Unwin.
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``I mentioned to her that that I was writing this book, that it was a chase story, a revenge story, and it was set during these riots in Launceston, and her ears kind of pricked up and she sat forward and said 'You must send it to me straight away','' he said.
The next night, Wilson was awarded the 2011 Australian/Vogel's literature prize for The Roving Party, which went on to receive critical acclaim.
Now he's judging entries for the 2015 prize, and next week his second novel, To Name Those Lost, hits bookstores across Australia.
``When I started writing (To Name Those Lost) I didn't know that The Roving Party was going to be published,'' he said.
``I didn't think the Roving Party would ever get published - why would anybody want to read a book about Aboriginal genocide?
``I had this book (To Name Those Lost) started, hoping this one people might be interested in, this is a story that resonates, it's universal.
``It's dark, but it's not pitch black.''
Wilson is pleased to be finally setting it free into the world, on a whirlwind promotional tour that is giving him a break from his 9 to 5 job of writing his third novel.
He says it's ``pretty close'' to the book he set out to write when he started it nearly four years ago.
``The book I set out to write was a lot darker, meaner and more violent,'' he said.
``It ended up getting softened a bit and pulling back from complete nihilistic violence and darkness.
``One of the things I learned in The Roving Party ... is that people care about characters and what happens to those characters, and they want to be emotionally invested in those characters.
``They want to know they're a good person, or that they're trying to do good things most of the time ... and there wasn't a lot of that in The Roving Party.
``I found myself going in the same direction (with To Name Those Lost)) and it takes away a bit of that moral complexity... I was trying to find redeeming features (for the characters), I spent a lot of time working on that, making them more interesting and making them more emotionally complicated.''
The story picks up the tale of Thomas Toosey, a fictitious character who appears as a child in The Roving Party. It's 1847 in Northern Tasmania, and he's now a grown man, searching for the son he abandoned after the death of the boy's mother.
Only he's being hunted too, by the Irishman Fitheal Flynn and his hooded companion, from whom Toosey has stolen.
The streets of Launceston are in disarray as angry citizens rise up against a government trying to enforce a tax to pay for its railways.
Wilson concedes he had maybe ``an afternoon off'' once To Name Those Lost was sent off to his publisher in November, before sitting down to start on his next work.
It's not set in the past, but in 2074, in a privately-run immigration detention centre at Port Arthur, where the detainees - environmental refugees from the Maldives - are forced to work to make a profit for the company.
Life as a full-time and published writer has taken some getting used to, Wilson says, despite it being his dream.
``I'm always surprised, and I'm always shocked, and I'm always kind of confronted about how hard it actually is,'' he said.
``The more you learn, the more you realise you don't know anything, and the more you realise you're so far away from the Tim Wintons and the David Mitchells and the Richard Flanagans and the Peter Careys of the world.
``It just feels like an impossible mountain to climb.'
