In April 2022 Vikki Petraitis' novel The Unbelieved won the inaugural Allen & Unwin Crime Fiction prize yet the school where she taught would not let her teach English.
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Ms Petraitis is an internationally successful true crime podcaster and best selling author of 17 true crime books. Her debut crime fiction novel The Unbelieved was released this month.
The school said she could not teach English because she had initially qualified as a primary school teacher.
However Ms Petraitis had continued her studies and was qualified to teach literature to Year 10 students.
She was told even when she finished her PhD in creative writing there would be no opportunity to join the English department because she wouldn't have Victorian Certificate of Education experience.
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Ms Petraitis had been teaching for some 30 years.
"They had this chess board, this check mate, where I would never be able to teach English there."
True crime writer
By day a school teacher, at night Ms Petraitis did shifts with the police and interviewed detectives.
Ms Petraitis' first true crime book, The Phillip Island Murder, was published in 1993.
Her true crime books are about hope.
"We are exploring the human condition around crime.
"How do people fight back and to me that is a very interesting part of this."
Initially a self-taught author, she didn't follow conventions such as not connecting with the people she interviewed and some have become close friends.
Turning to fiction
Her novel The Unbelieved was "a result of doing a PhD in creative writing to challenge my skills in a totally different way and address things like injustice against women and children" which she couldn't do in true crime books.
It also gave Ms Petraitis an opportunity to explore her personal experience of "men in charge of workplaces blocking women all the time".
"If I was an international podcaster and bestselling author and male I am fairly certain my skills would have been utilised and celebrated".
She says women are often blocked in the workplace, hence the book is "resonating with women and selling like hotcakes".
"Not only do women have to do their job but they also have to factor in the time to spend butting heads with the hierarchy.
"So it was fulfilling to look not just at the crime issues but also the work issues I was hearing from women about how hard it is to battle misogyny and bullying and the people who get power from putting people down.
"I think as a nation we have too many of them."
Ms Petraitis is one of the guest authors travelling to the South Coast to present and conduct workshops at the Sisters in Crime two-day writers festival in Merimbula and Cobargo this week.
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