Clay, 36, said the book was about Q, a kindergarten teacher and martial arts expert in the Blue Mountains, who falls in love with a vegan named Rabbit.

''She's not totally good at her job - her best friend is a six-year-old who is far more mature than she is … and she doesn't quite know how to woo a vegan,'' Clay said.

However, she soon has bigger problems: she has to save Rabbit and his hippie friends from a plague of zombies.

A fan of science fiction and humour - one of her favourite authors is Douglas Adams, who wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Clay has lived most of her life in Canberra. She studied law and creative writing at the University of Wollongong with a year on exchange in Colorado and has worked in rubbish for the ACT government (''It's more interesting than it sounds''), in counter-terrorism and for the Law Society.

Her day job now is as a technical writer but she began writing creatively in 2003. ''It takes a while to learn the craft,'' she said.

In 2008 she won the Hachette Queensland Writers Centre Manuscript Development Award and although the book was not published she learnt a lot about writing from the experience.

''I started taking it more seriously after that.''

She worked on A Single Girl's Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse for about three years and in 2010 won the Olvar Wood Fellowship Award. It still took a while to find a publisher: she submitted it to about 10 before striking it lucky at the genre fiction convention GenreCon in Sydney last year with Momentum.

''They liked it and I found an agent at GenreCon too - it worked all round.''

She is working on two other novels, a time travel farce set in the 1920s and a thriller set in outback Australia, but is also having ''a month of celebration'' for her debut, which is already attracting reviews and blog mentions.