'I felt like I had everything I'd ever wanted. The next month, I was told I had a year to live': Aussie author Sulari Gentill on her battle with cancer

Sulari Gentill was riding a high. After 12 years of writing mystery novels, the Aussie author had finally found overnight success in the US with her latest standalone novel, The Woman In The Library.

Following a whirlwind US tour in 2024, she celebrated with a trip on every mystery author's dream vessel: The Orient Express. 

"A journey on the Orient Express is, in fact, three journeys in one," she tells nine.com.au.

"You're moving in space between Paris and Venice, but you're also stepping back in time because it's a historic train. The moment you step on there, everything is as it would have been in the '20s and '30s, so you feel like you've travelled back 100 years to that kind of grandeur and elegance.

"But the other thing is you don't ever step aboard a train like the Orient Express without taking with you all the train mysteries and literature that have gone before. And so it feels like a journey through literature as well." 

It was the multifaceted aspect of her journey that kick-started her train of thought into "how fiction actually affects our lens of reality."

She was on cloud nine, fuelled with inspiration and ready to write again, focusing on how to incorporate the previous literature about the famed train into a new story.

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But as she settled in back home to put pen to paper, she was struck down by the worst news she could possibly receive: she had stage four cancer.  

"One month, I felt like I had everything I had ever wanted in my life… the next month, I was told I had a year to live," she says, "It was this kind of strange, crazy balancing of the universe."

Sulari was quickly thrust into a year and a half of intensive treatment, including three major surgeries, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy.

All the while, she made sure to never lose sight of her passion project. 

"One of the things I noticed when you are diagnosed with a serious illness, you become a patient. Everything becomes about fighting that illness," she shares.

"I didn't want it to become my identity, someone who was fighting cancer. I wanted it just to be something that happened to me, and I needed to remind myself that I was a writer.

"That's who I was, and so, I made sure that every day, even if all I could do was get out one sentence, I wrote." 

The mother of two says the process of writing became "part of my journey to coming out the other side.

"All the treatment could go on around me, but it didn't matter. I had to get out the other side because I had to deliver this book."

Five Found Dead is the latest in Sulari's repertoire of 18 novels published over the last 13 years. It follows mystery author Joe Penvale, who, with his sister Meredith, boards the Orient Express for a well-deserved trip after Joe's intensive cancer treatment. 

But what they don't know is not only is there a virus that has infiltrated the train, trapping its passengers inside, but there is also a killer on board, picking them off one by one. Along with a ragtag team of detectives and private investigators, each with their own secret motives, the siblings must solve the mystery before they become victims themselves.

"The book is a conversation about isolation, about how countries behave when there is something going on between borders that's dangerous, [and] how people behave in the light of something like murder, bearing in mind that they have been trained by crime fiction and mysteries past to behave in a certain way," she explains.

If the premise seems a little familiar, that's because it is. Sulari is known to weave her own personal experiences into her writing. In her latest novel, "you will see that a lot of my grapplings with mortality in that year sort of eked their way into that narrative".

Another very subtle way she mirrors reality in her work is by introducing clues about her character's racial identity.

In her breakout novel Crossing the Lines, the main character, Madeleine, is a mystery writer who lives in the mountains with her husband as she grapples between the world of her novel and her reality. It is only halfway through the novel that she is revealed to be of a South Asian background.  

"I've always been kind of intrigued by the default to white that we have in Western society. If you're not told a character is brown, you just assume they were white… and I think that's just a product of being brought up in the West, where all the stories are about white people," she says. 

But the author believes the solution to the issue isn't just to make all of her characters people of colour. 

"I've never spoken about the race of any of my characters. But what I started [doing is] giving readers a hint the character they may have pictured as white all the way along might not be. Because for me, that means readers will then think about 'why did I think she was white?', and 'is my opinion of her different now I know she could be brown?'

"I have a belief that, in essence, human beings are much the same. Our appearance and our culture is one facet of things, but it does not change who we are deeply."

Sulari herself is of a Sri-Lankan background, having come to Australia at age six. Now in her fifties, she lives in the Snowy Mountains with her husband and children, as well as several animals, dividing her time between writing and growing French black truffles. 

Both of her pastimes started out as hobbies, a break from her reality as a lawyer of 15 years. 

"I was one of those people that was constantly taking up hobbies and doing them madly for about six months, and then moving on to the next hobby. And I didn't realise it at the time, that the whole hobbying thing was probably an indication there was something more I wanted out of my working life that I wasn't getting." 

She expected much of the same when she picked up writing, but "almost as soon as I started, it felt very natural. It felt like I was breathing properly for the first time in my life, and the thought of not writing was a little bit like the thought of not breathing.

"So then it took over. I realised very quickly that it was all I wanted to do, and I didn't think it was a fair deal for me to be a lawyer when I didn't really care that much anymore." 

That was back in 2012. Since then, she has authored a 10-book historical crime fiction series based on the titular protagonist, a 1930s gentleman artist and amateur detective named Rowland Sinclair, as well as the Greek Mythology-inspired The Hero Trilogy, and three standalone mystery novels. 

For her work, she has been recognised with a slew of awards and nominations, namely for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Davitt Award, and the Ned Kelly Award.

Her illness has by no means slowed her down, and now that she feels healthier, she is getting right back into the swing of things.

The author shared she is well into planning the newest Rowland Sinclair novel, another Greek-Inspired tale, and is editing yet another standalone novel, with many more ideas on the back burner.

"This is the 18th book that I'm just finishing," she says, "and every single one of them has been written with no idea what's on the next page, let alone what's at the end of the book."

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