Kim Wilkins is the daughter of Australian parents but lived in England until the age of four. She grew up in Redcliffe, Queensland and wrote her first novel at the age of nine. Wilkins played bass for the Vampigs and other rock bands and worked in a variety of jobs including fast food and typing.
Wilkins gained a first class honours degree in literature (1998), an MA (2000), and a Ph.D (2006) from The University of Queensland. Wilkins also won the University Medal for academic achievement in 1998. She has subsequently taught at The University of Queensland, where she was promoted to Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Arts in 2017. Her interests include medievalism, adaptation, speculative fiction, and creative uses of mythology.
Primarily an author of fantasy (including horror / dark fantasy) and contemporary epic women's fiction, Wilkins has published novels, children's literature, young-adult literature, novellas and short stories. Her women's fiction, under the pen-name Kimberley Freeman, often explores the struggles of women across disparate time periods. Her fiction is notable for strong, central female characters.
Wilkins' first novel, The Infernal , was published in 1997. Since then, she has published over twenty additional novels, including series for adults such as the Europa Suite and the Blood and Gold series, the Gina Champion Mystery paranormal mystery series for teenagers, and the Sunken Kingdom series for children, as well as a number of standalone novels, novellas (collected in The Year of Ancient Ghosts) and short stories.
She has been published in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Italy and Germany. Among her awards are five Aurealis Awards and a Ditmar Award.
She is the author of the AustLit scholarly bibliography Australian Popular Medievalism which identifies the ways that medieval themes have influenced popular Australian fiction. Read her introductory essay on the project, 'Bell, Book, and Battleaxe'. Wilkins is also a project leader in the Australian Popular Fictions Research Community for AustLit. In 2015, she began a long-term research project on the genre worlds of 21st-century Australian fiction with fellow researchers David Carter, Beth Driscoll, and Lisa Fletcher. In 2021, she was the editor, with Samantha J. Rayner, of a collection of essays on influential Regency romance writer Georgette Heyer, Georgette Heyer, History, and Historical Fiction (UCL Press, 2021).
