K.S. Nikakis

Hi wonderful readers, lovely to meet you!

K S Nikakis stands for Karen Simpson Nikakis but that's a bit too long to fit on a book cover! I write both fiction (fantasy) and nonfiction (poetry/travel/meditative) but like to use Deep Fantasy elements in all my works. I coined the term Deep Fantasy to describe the second, hidden story good narratives contain, a story first identified by the famous mythologer Joseph Campbell. He noted that the myths that survived for thousands of years in disparate cultures used symbols and metaphors and drew on timeless archetypes to create stories of great psychological power.

My first books were The Kira Chronicles trilogy which transformed into the six book The Kira Chronicles series. Can healing and killing be reconciled? Read the series and find out! My Angel Caste series (five books) explores a similar problem of bringing opposites together, in this case, the angelic and human parts of the half-angel Viv who searches for her long lost mother in the weird worlds of the Rynth.

In I Heard the Wolf Call My Name (shortlisted in the 2019 Aurealis Awards - Australia's premier fantasy awards) a sexually fluid shifter struggles to find where he truly belongs, while in The Third Moon, the hero fights to protect aliens on a colonised planet from the fate his people suffered thousands of years before on Earth. Messenger is also about overcoming prejudice to mend a broken world, while in Heart Hunter, the hero embarks on an impossible quest to reverse climate change. The Emerald Serpent, a Celtic inspired story, explores three planes of existence and the potential of memory to keep us whole. My latest novel, The Dragon of the Drowned World, suggests that mythic creatures might just hold the power to heal.

I've recently collected my short stories into The White Stag and Other Short Stories with Deep Fantasy Retellings. These stories range from those that use Jungian contexts, through to Australia's red Outback, to traditional Celtic settings populated with European Fae and, as the title suggests, the collection also discusses the stories' Deep Fantasy aspects.

I travel a lot both in Australia and overseas and was a Geography teacher in a former life. While that was years ago, I remain fascinated by landscape. My nonfiction work Journey: Seeking the Sacred, Spirit and Soul in the Australian Wilderness mixes travelogue with poetry and novel excerpts to explore Deep Fantasy while my other nonfiction work In the Company of Birds: Poems from an Outback Odyssey, undertakes a similar exploration through bird-inspired poetry.

My working life was spent in the Education Industries and I hold a Ph.D in Joseph Campbell's hero quest applied to a female hero and an M.Ed (Hons) in the purposes of dragons in literature. I live in Melbourne with my husband and now write full time.