Academic turned author, Kisane Slaney, is excited about her soon-to-be-released debut novel The Heiress at age 82. After a lifetime working in other fields and personal challenges she has turned to a new field and is revelling in the change in direction, she tells Have a Go News.
“I’ve had an eclectic life from photographic modelling in Sydney in the 1960s to being a senior lecturer at university in 2006, not to mention raising four children in between this radical shift in direction,” she says.
Kisane, of Bentley, is a former Murdoch University student who, as a mature-age student, gained first-class honours and a PhD. After counselling in the fields of domestic violence and child sexual abuse, she went on to become a senior lecturer at Curtin University in the School of Social Work. Later, she decided to go online and become an international counsellor.
It was while she was caring long-term for her daughter after she suffered a bad accident that she decided to start writing.
“My sister casually said to me, ‘why don’t you write a book.’
“So off I went, coming up with The Heiress, a forbidden love romance in The Thorn Birds tradition. It includes the story of a British child migrant sent to a Catholic institution in Western Australia, which makes it more relevant to WA readers. The second theme is more focused on child sexual abuse, which I built into a story of how the bishops responded to it in the 1970s.
“The Heiress, set in Paris, London, Perth, Melbourne and Bali, is the story of Tiana, half English and half French, who comes from a very wealthy family. She attends an exclusive London boarding school, and when her father dies, she inherits a fortune.
“Her mother is very strict. She supports various French charities and entertains members of the Catholic hierarchy at her weekly Monday afternoon teas. Here, Tiana meets the handsome, charismatic priest Philippe Gagnon. She has a huge crush on him and she’s only 15.
“Tiana’s mother can see the effect Philippe has had on her. When Tiana’s father dies, Philippe, now a bishop, is at the airport to support her when she flies in from boarding school after being told the sad news.
“Tiana falls passionately in love with him but he’s now living in the Vatican and is then sent to Australia. The rest of the book focuses on Tiana trying to reach Australia and tell Philippe that she loves him.”
Kisane says that to help promote her self-published book, she joined Substack, an online subscription service with more than 35 million active subscriptions, including some of the world’s most celebrated writers and creators such as Margaret Atwood and George Saunders.
“For one of my posts I got 114 new subscribers and 54 comments so I had to reply to all of them. I’m writing about women who are writing in their 60s-plus and so it really seems to have hit a nerve.”
Kisane is already working on her second book, The Three Sisters.
“It’s based on my three amazing English great aunts. One owned millinery boutiques, another was a top buyer for Debenhams in London and used to receive fantastic Christmas presents and the third was a fabulous chef.”

The Heiress, released on October 14, will be available on Kindle (download on Amazon.com.au) for $7.70 and $17.70 in paperback.