Who She Is
Dinuka McKenzie (pronounced Dee-noo-kah) is an Australian crime fiction writer based in Southern Sydney, where she lives on Dharawal country with her husband, two children, and a pet chicken. She describes herself as a writer and book addict – and her involvement with the Australian literary community makes that description more than casual self-deprecation. Beyond the page, McKenzie has a professional career in the environmental sector, a life outside of fiction that points to a larger civic commitment that runs through her writing and public work alike.
Early Writing and Banjo Prize
Even before her first novel reached the shelves of the bookshop, McKenzie was already enjoying serious recognition in the Australian publishing world. Her first manuscript, then called Flood Debris, won the prestigious HarperCollins Australia Banjo Prize in 2020, a competition looking for new Australian voices in fiction. The success resulted in a publishing deal with HarperCollins Australia and the manuscript was developed and published in February 2022 as The Torrent. At the same time, a separate unpublished manuscript, Taken, was longlisted for the 2020 Richell Prize, signalling that her debut was not a one-off, but the beginning of a sustained creative output.
The Detective Kate Miles Series
McKenzie’s work to date has focused on Detective Sergeant Kate Miles, a police officer who works in the fictional NSW town of Esserton. Esserton is a coastal hinterland town situated somewhere between Tweed Heads and Murwillumbah in the far north east of NSW. Kate Miles is a distinctive character, a woman trying to juggle the competing demands of a demanding career and a complicated personal life, whose cases are always set against a wider social backdrop of family, community and the failure of institutions to protect the vulnerable.
In The Torrent (2022), Kate is introduced in the last weeks of her pregnancy, overworked and counting down to maternity leave, when a violent robbery and a suspicious flood drowning collide into something she can’t walk away from. The novel was lauded for its tense atmosphere and its grounding in the devastating NSW floods of the time. Upon her return from maternity leave in Taken (2023) Kate investigated the disappearance of an infant, while also facing a corruption scandal that could bring down her father. Raising the personal stakes even more was Tipping Point (2024): Kate’s distant brother returns home to bury a childhood friend who has taken his own life and shortly after another member of the same close-knit group is found shot dead – a mystery that spans decades. The series is published in Australia and the UK, the latter editions being published by Canelo Crime.
Awards & Recognitions
As well as the Banjo Prize, McKenzie’s writing has been shortlisted for two of the major awards for Australian crime fiction: the Sisters in Crime Davitt Awards and the Bad Sydney Crime Danger Awards, and longlisted for the Richell Prize. Her short fiction has also found a home in the wider genre community, appearing in the 2022 crime and thriller anthology, Dark Deeds Down Under. In this consistency, she has been recognized in multiple formats and competitions, and she is one of the more notable emerging voices in contemporary Australian crime writing.
Literary and Community Citizenship
McKenzie’s legacy to Australian literature is much more than her own novels. In 2020-22 she was a volunteer member of the organising committee for the Sutherland Shire Writers’ Festival (Writers Unleashed) and helped to build a platform for writers and readers in her community. She has run writing workshops for festivals and organisations across the country including Writers South Australia, Writers Victoria, WestWords and the South Coast Writers Centre. She is a manuscript assessor and mentor for crime fiction with the Australian Society of Authors, invested in the craft and dedicated to helping the next generation of writers find their feet.
A Presence in the World of Crime Fiction
McKenzie has established a reputation as a knowledgeable and engaging presence at literary events. She has hosted in-conversation events with some of the biggest names in crime fiction, including Michael Robotham, Dervla McTiernan, Candice Fox, Chris Hammer and Emma Viskic, just to name a few. She’s “a born storyteller,” Robotham himself has said of her, and McTiernan notes she has “talent to burn” – praise from inside the genre that carries a lot of weight. She is with Alex Adsett Literary.
What Makes Her Different
McKenzie’s achievement in a crowded field is her ability to ground high-stakes crime plots in deeply felt domestic and regional realities. Her fiction is not just procedural; it is acutely sensitive to the pressures that drain people’s spirits: financial strain, family duty, institutional corruption, the burden of the past. Kate Miles is a protagonist made for this world: fallible, determined, and embedded in a community that is never merely backdrop but always part of the crime itself.
With three books into a series that has found readers in two countries, with a growing awards profile and a significant contribution to the broader literary community, Dinuka McKenzie has emerged as a serious and purposeful voice in Australian crime fiction — one whose best work may be yet to come.
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