Goodreads asked Kevin Price:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Kevin Price The idea for Kumakana didn't really get 'got' - rather it seemed to materialise and become, and in many ways, even after publishing, it is still becoming. Two things seemed to cross paths. First, the notion that Australian fairy tales were either dependent upon European ideas of the fantastic. And secondly, such tales were told only from some aspect of Indigenous lore.

Neither of these positions really suited me.

I wanted to tell an Australian fairy tale, a tale of myths and legends, an adventure in magical realism, that did not rely on the imported notion of European myth and legend. Because I am not an indigenous person, I had no cultural access to an Indigenous fable, nor did I know of one that would satisfy my needs to use the story as a way of inventing a background for exploring our relationship to country and all it contains.

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