Last modified on Mon 1 Feb 2021 02.46 EST A first-time novelist has collected Australia’s richest literary prize with her apocalyptic and eerily-timed tale about a world in the throes of a pandemic. Dr Laura Jean McKay took out the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature on Monday for The Animals in That Country, a debut novel described by Guardian reviewer Justine Jordan as a fierce and funny exploration of other consciousnesses, and the limits of language. The prescient nature of the work is purely coincidental, McKay told the Guardian, speaking from her home in New Zealand’s Palmerston North, where she has been lecturing in creative writing at Massey University for the past 18 months. She began writing the novel six years before the world had heard of Covid-19.