Bird, born in Launceston, is one of Tasmania's most published and best-known contemporary writers.

Field of Poppies is her tenth novel, and follows a couple through a tree change gone wrong.

Keen to escape the pressures of city life, Marsali Swift and her husband William are drawn to the seemingly tranquil small town of Muckleton.

Yet one night their home is robbed, and soon after a neighbour is murdered. The violent history of the couple's adopted Goldfields town is revealed, and subtle and sinister details emerge.

In a review, fellow writer Michael McGirr said of the book, "It celebrates the human catastrophe with grace and charm. It takes years of experience for a writer to be able to pull off this kind of sorcery'."

Bird has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award three times, and was the 2016 winner of the Patrick White Literary Award.

She said her latest novel was inspired by a simple item: a hair clip.

"A friend went to a gallery where she bought a fancy hair clip, which she gave to me," she said.

"The image on the hair clip was Woman with a Parasol, one of Claude Monet's many depictions of his wife.

"I went on a little Monet spree, and naturally I came to Field of Poppies in Argenteuil. I can't really say why 'Poppies' set my imagination in motion, but it did."

The main character in her book, Marsali, is based on the character that has formed in her imagination after seeing the beguiling painting of the woman with the parasol.

As a little reference to herself, Marsali even carries a parasol, like the woman in the painting.

"Before I knew it, I was writing about the poppies in Flanders, about the waste and horror of war," she said.

"That lead me on to meditate on the ravages that humans have visited upon the planet itself."

But the book was not informed by doom and gloom, but rather, the dissonance between resilient, marvelous ordinary lives, somehow ticking away as per usual in a time of extraordinary turbelence - not the least of which, being the threat of climate change.

"As I descended into the bewildering darkness of wars, refugees, climate, disease, overcrowding, starvation, thirst, extinctions - I saw all around me people who lead cheerful, comfortable Australian lives, playing sport, going to the opera, the café, the art gallery, flying to Paris, decorating their hair with fancy clips," she said.

"The novel was beginning to take shape.

"But it ironic of course that something as innocent and sweet as the fancy hairclip should have set all this in motion."

The book is available now.