Donna Maree Hanson, Author, Phd in Creative Writing

Kaaren’s website here.

When I first met Kaaren in the early 2000s she was vibrant, focussed and enthusiastic. And she never ceased being so, even when she knew her days were numbered. She was determined to live every day to the full, feeling as well as she could for as long as she could.

After meeting Kaaren at an editing workshop where she as a presenter, we got talking about auditing and said come and work at the Australian National Audit Ofice. I did apply and got in and we worked together on audit projects. Partners! She approached her work in a focussed and organised way and she had a really ordered way of looking at things. She made audits fun, even though she was very competitive. You’ll never be as old as me, she said once. I replied, “Not much I can do about that.” She was also a writer and a horsewoman at that time, as well as a runner and cyclist. She was as focussed about those things as she was everything else. Her earlier books featured flying horses. She was quirky I suppose, she would tell me about the conversations she had with her characters. Her Kered’s Cry series was about recovery from trauma and it was researched and planned.

We were working together when she got her first breast cancer diagnosis. I cried. She told me to stop it. That was Kaaren. Tackling breast cancer was a huge challenge, one which Kaaren attacked like everything else. The only casualty was writing. Her publisher turned out to be dodgy and the stress became too much. I published the last book in her trilogy when I had my publishing imprint. I remember talking to her after her mastectomy and she had been outside in the cul de sac (she lived rural) trying to get her fitness back up. She went into remission and made the five year and the ten year mark. She worked as a contract editor at the Australian National Audit Office and worked back at Immigration, her other home. She moved to the coast and then moved again, once she found a tumour on her spine. She wanted to lessen the chores so her husband didn’t have to worry. Always planning ahead, always organising. She gave her her horses, her mini ponies but kept her cats. There are many more adventures of Kaaren, coming off horses and so on…

From memory, she’d started writing again when there was a lump on her neck. Dragon Boating and kayaking had become her new athletic thing as well. Up in Canberra, she had a very gruelling 7 hour operation to remove the tumour on her vertebrae just below her neck. I remember her telling me that it could affect her eyesight as she had to be on her face the whole time. They put a little cage in there to replace the vertebrae. I visited her in hospital afterwards and the worst thing was a sore neck. She’d hurt her neck a few years before getting thrown off her horse and nearly lost the use of her arms. At this time I didn’t know it was a recurence of the breast cancer. Maybe Kaaren suspected. When they sequenced it, they found it matched her breast cancer. She was officially terminal. She refused chemo at first but had some radiation. The doctor talked her into a drug that slowed bone metabilising. She was fit and well for maybe a year, nothing to see on the scans. She wrote the first book in her trilogy, Undercover Mage, featuring Everand from her first series. She started on the second. I remember her telling me. The doctors want me to to X and I can’t because I need to be well enough to launch this book and write the next one. She donated money from the sale of the books to breast cancer charity. She finished the trilogy, did in person launches for all the books and wrote a romance novel, which she finished just a couple of weeks before she died. When others would curl up and die, Kaaren refused to.

In the photo above she was at the RWA conference in Sydney in 2023. She had started entering competitions for anthologies and placing. It really lit up her world to get the validation and the encouragement. This year she placed second in the spicy bites.

Her funeral was beautiful and everything so many people said was true. She was many things and it is really hard to think of her gone. I’m crying now, because i’m writing about it. But after the funeral I had to think of her somewhere else, not gone as that was the only way I can cope. She had a positive influence on me always. She had me riding horses and writing and laughing. One of the things I learned about Kaaren’s life from her brother was that she had a really good childhood. I think that’s why she could walk around with a little dragon on her shoulder and wear it with pride. She had a solid beginning.

Kaaren leaves behind her husband, two daughters, son-in-law and a grandson. I remember one of her goals was to live to him born and she made it to his first birthday. She touched many lives and so many people. I can never be as brave as she was, as forward thinking and as caring of others, particularly her family. If she knew I was crying now, she’d say. Stop! Stop that.