Latest news with #AlwaysHomesick
The Guardian
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Hannah Kent: ‘I was kind of having a second adolescence'
The way Hannah Kent tells it, the wood-lined backstreets of the Adelaide Hills are as important to her writing as the hours spent at her desk. 'This is where I walk when I'm talking out my books,' she says as we set out from her gravel driveway. 'This is the closest thing to a daily jaunt – there's a few hills, it's a pretty sweaty affair.' It is usually Kent's wife, Heidi, who walks alongside her, patiently listening as the bestselling novelist 'mutters aloud' about the roadblocks and challenges blighting her latest work-in-progress. 'It's a great gift, you know, to have her put up with me for an hour while I simply talk out everything that's not happening.' Kent is a few days out from her 40th birthday when we meet, and in the middle of rewrites for a screenwriting project. She's excited about the milestone; she has had enough friends pass away too young to be insecure about ageing. The passage of time has also been front of mind thanks to her latest book, Always Home, Always Homesick, a memoir whose knots were also teased out over these rolling hills. The book had its origins during the pandemic restrictions, when she and Heidi would trace this same loop with their young daughter and newborn son – two sleep-deprived parents pushing a giant pram. Kent was supposed to be finishing her third novel, Devotion, but the anxiety of lockdowns, border restrictions and motherhood were seeping into her subconscious. 'I was having these incredible dreams about Iceland, very intense, sensory-heavy, very realistic dreams,' she says. 'I started to have this acute feeling of homesickness for Iceland.' The frosty and remote Nordic nation has played a formative role in Kent's literary career and personal life since she first visited in 2003 as a bookish 17-year-old on a Rotary exchange. It was a big leap; the teenager spoke no Icelandic and arrived at a cold, dark Keflavík airport in the middle of winter. She was still there when the airport closed hours later – the welcoming party had forgotten about her. Eventually, Kent would make friends, learn the language and gain an adoptive second family who started calling her 'Hannah okkar' – 'our Hannah'. In 2020, while Kent was dreaming of Iceland, Kent's mother dropped off a giant cardboard box full of ephemera from her childhood – including journals, letters and folders of printed-out emails from those difficult first months in Iceland. 'I started thinking more and more about what I was experiencing at [this] point in my life. It was this kind of disconnection from self through becoming a parent, not really knowing how to write, and feeling physically alienated from myself because I didn't recognise my own body. 'And then I was reading these emails that my mum had dropped off, where I'm 17 years old and feeling kind of the same way – like feeling on the cusp of something. Feeling kind of frustrated, but also curious, and not really knowing who I am.' 'I was kind of having a second adolescence,' she realised; one that drew her unwaking mind back to Iceland. Kent had always dreamed of being a writer. This walking route isn't far from her childhood home, and when we pass a particularly beautiful paperbark tree, its outer layers peeling off in crisp white sheets, Kent explains how she used to make books out of bark as a kid. That dream took form in Iceland. It was on that first trip to Iceland that Kent encountered the story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last person to be executed in Iceland. Her life and death – executed in 1830 for her part in the killing of two men – would later inspire Kent's debut novel, Burial Rites, in 2014. Its international success made Kent's name as a writer – while forever linking it with Iceland. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Chasing Magnúsdóttir's story taught Kent the craft of historical fiction – a careful mediation between slivers of revelation in the archive and a creative process that bordered on otherworldly (the final words she ascribes to Agnes came to Kent in a dream). 'It's intoxicating, it's such a heavy process,' Kent reflects. 'You have these moments of discovery which can completely shift your perspective. It's almost euphoric when you can discover something, or when your own speculations have proven to be correct, [because] there's so much doubt involved in any research process.' The story of her 2003 exchange was frequently retold when Kent was a debut novelist on the promotional trail, but she had taken care to keep some things for herself. She had always brushed off the idea of writing a memoir, but after finishing Devotion she was drawn back to those dreams. 'I've never really thought of my life as being interesting enough,' she says. 'That was why I write fiction – I'm drawn to other people's lives.' But after the challenges of her third novel, Kent realised the best way to reconcile this second adolescence was to make sense of the first. 'Spending all this time with my 17-year-old self, even just reading journals and diaries, there's a real anxiety there. Like, 'I've got to work out who I am, and what's authentic.' 'It's this idea of 'becoming', so that then you can get on with things. And then, of course, you keep getting older and the 'becoming' is endless. You're just always becoming, it's a constant state. 'All this yearning and questioning and curiosity converged at this particular point in time. And I thought, I'm getting that feeling I get when I know I've got to write about it to be rid of it.' She thought it would be easy, but her own past still required untangling. That box of her teenage writings was itself an imperfect archive, where the chipper accounts she emailed back to her parents didn't always align with her own memories, or the person she remembered being. 'I hadn't anticipated that at all. So as much as it's a reckoning with something that happened, it's [also] a reckoning with the person right now, and maybe the stories you have told about yourself. That was interesting.' Once border restrictions lifted, she eventually returned to Iceland in 2023 after being invited to open a literary festival. The homecoming allowed her to reflect on a place that had not only transformed her life and writing, but had also been subtly influenced in return. Today, the site of Magnúsdóttir's execution bears a new memorial that quotes from Burial Rites – and the words that came to Kent in a dream. Since she wrote Burial Rites, the public's understanding of the case has also evolved. In 2017 Iceland mounted a mock retrial using original transcripts that weren't available when she wrote the book. This time, Magnúsdóttir's life was spared in favour of a reduced 14-year prison sentence. Kent says she would probably write the book differently if embarking on it today, and wonders if she gave enough weight to the likelihood of sexual abuse in the story. Writing the memoir, Always Home, Always Homesick, gave Kent a chance to reconsider Magnúsdóttir in print. But it also invites readers to commune with another figure from the past: that restless teenage girl who dreamed of being a writer and stepped off a plane into a cold and dark unknown. 'You know that almost physical feeling of just bursting with creativity?' Kent says. 'It was a real pleasure to be able to spend time with a younger Hannah who had that every day, you know? Because I do feel like you have to stay awake to it. 'I do think that you can lose that euphoria, you can lose that sense of wonder, and it's nice to still look at your contemporary creative practice, and be like, 'No, it's still there.' You know, I'm still being led by the same things.' After about an hour the loop has led us back to Kent's home – one of them at least. She waves goodbye at the driveway and heads back inside. After all, she has writing to do. Always Home, Always Homesick by Hannah Kent is out now through Picador
The Age
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
‘Inconvenient women', mortality and a controversial work by Joan Didion: 13 new books to delve into
So here we are, going into the last month of autumn and if you're one of those people getting ready to hunker down in the impending cooler weather then there are plenty of new books for you to stock up on. Memoirs, fiction, science, even a controversial posthumous publication − so much to feast on. No wonder May is named after Maia, the Roman goddess for fertility and growth. Always Home, Always Homesick Hannah Kent Picador, $36.99 April 29 Burial Rites, about the last woman executed in Iceland, was one of those books that captured the imagination of readers when it was published in 2013. Now Hannah Kent has written a lovely memoir about the curious path she took to becoming a writer − an exchange program took her as a 17-year-old to Iceland, a country she chose because she had never seen snow. She had the luck, she writes, to be born into a story-loving family and with that legacy has written three novels and now this tender account of how Iceland captivated her and forged her literary career. Desire Paths Megan Clement Ultimo, $36.99 April 29 In her introduction, Megan Clement, who has lived in Australia, France, England and Zimbabwe, writes that 2020 was the year when 'grief' and 'trauma' were dropped into the cultural mainstream. In the course of this touching and carefully constructed memoir of dealing with the stringencies of the Melbourne lockdowns and the impending death of her terminally ill father, she also considers the nature of home, belonging and the meaning and realities of borders. Little World Josephine Rowe Black Inc., $27.99 April 29 Orrin Bird has been left an unusual bequest − the incorruptible body of a saint in a box made of canoe wood. (Remember the saint in Charlotte Wood's Stone Yard Devotional?) The saint was young when thought to have died brutally, but her mind is still active, 'time breaking contract with her body' and 'death has brought very little in the way of answers'. In clear prose, this short, idiosyncratic novel brings us the people with whom the little saint 'travels' through time and landscape, her response to their predicaments and her reflections on her own existence. A remarkable concoction. Everything Lost, Everything Found Matthew Hooton HarperCollins, $34.99 April 30 What was it Faulkner said? 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' The revisiting of earlier events occurs in many novels, and does so again in Matthew Hooton's much-admired third. Jack is 12 years old when his mother is mauled by a croc in the Tapajos River in Brazil. Many years later, Jack, by now a grandfather, recognises he doesn't 'have infinite time to curate my own past' as his wife Gracie 'slips into ever longer states of forgetting'. But how can he come to terms with the past and his present? Lonely Mouth Jacqueline Maley Fourth Estate, $34.99 April 30 The first novel by Jacqueline Maley, columnist with The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, became a bestseller. Her second opens with a paragraph that leaps off the page and plunges you into the story of Matilda, a fry chef at posh Sydney restaurant Bocca, her younger half-sister Lara, a model who lives in Paris, and their flighty mum, Barbara. When Lara's father, the decidedly dodgy actor Angus, reappears in their lives, any sort of equilibrium goes up in smoke. It's hard to put down. Notes to John Joan Didion Fourth Estate, $34.99 April 30 This book is slightly problematic. You wonder whether its author − were she still alive − would have approved of its publication. Joan Didion wrote the adored Year of Magical Thinking, about the 2003 death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. This posthumous book consists of notes addressed to him reporting on sessions with her psychiatrist, and reveals frank comments about their adopted daughter Quintana, alcoholism, depression and much more. If you love Didion, you'll probably want to read this. I Want Everything Dominic Amerena Summit Books, $34.99 April 30 'I acted immorally, but what did literature have to do with morality?' asks the would-be literary star − 'a style machine with no substance' − early in this absorbing novel about truth and ambition. The unnamed narrator stumbles on a controversial, reclusive author − 'sharply chiselled cheekbones, like the bust of a deposed dictator' − and proceeds to try to find out why she disappeared from the public eye. But to woo Brenda's trust, he tells a porky or three, and she might just be leading him on for her own purposes. All will be revealed in Dominic Amerena's delicious debut. The Opposite of Lonely Hilde Hinton Hachette, $32.99 April 30 The world takes its toll and Rose is well aware of that. Somehow, she seems to have shaken off friends, her father has died, her husband is no longer her husband and even her young son Max is trying her patience more than usual. After a near disaster while out shopping, a knight in shining armour comes to the rescue; Ellie, who becomes her new bestie. Loneliness is a curse at the best of times, so a friend indeed for a friend in need is a good thing … usually. Hilde Hinton has written another gentle and perceptive look at the travails of life. Vaccine Nation Raina MacIntyre NewSouth, $34.99 May 1 Biosecurity expert Raina MacIntyre's latest book is a lament at the rise since 2020 of health disinformation and a plea to understand the value of vaccinations given the sad inevitability of a new pandemic. She points out that flu vaccinations in Australia in the over 65s are at 60 per cent, whereas only a few years ago, 70 per cent was the norm. To improve public perception of vaccines and public health, according to MacIntyre, we need 'political will, global cooperation and an integrated approach'. Inconvenient Women Jacqueline Kent NewSouth, $34.99 May 1 Jacqueline Kent's titular women are the 'daughters of the suffragists, the mothers of … 1970s feminists'. These are the writers, ranging from Jean Devanny, author of the controversial The Butcher Shop, to Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal), Katharine Susannah Prichard and Nettie Palmer, who 'used their power with words in support of their beliefs, and to question and change elements of the world'. There are plenty of familiar names, but many not so well known, and Kent brings her cast of writers effortlessly to life. The Power of Choice Julian Kingma NewSouth, $49.99 May 1 Julian Kingma is a wonderful photographer. In this book, he has chosen to photograph terminally ill people who have decided to make use of Voluntary Assisted Dying legislation to ease their anxiety about death and regain dignity through their control of it. His stark black and white images are confronting, tender, beautiful, and terribly revealing. As 82-year-old former yoga teacher Liberty Pack says, 'I have no anxiety. I have a very peaceful feeling about the way my end will be.' The Power of Choice also has short introductions by Andrew Denton and Richard Flanagan. The Emperor of Gladness Ocean Vuong Jonathan Cape, $34.99 May 13 The American poet and novelist won acclaim for his first novel, the brilliantly titled On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, and follows it up with a story that begins with 19-year-old Haia about to jump from a bridge. He is stopped by an old Latvian woman, Grazina, suffering from dementia, who invites the troubled youth to stay with her. Both are struggling, but the connection they form through their friendship − their love − from their particular edges of American society brings meaning to them both. Loading The Names Florence Knapp Phoenix, $32.99 May 13 Does it matter what name you have? In Florence Knapp's first novel, Cora gives birth to a boy and wants to call him Julian. Her domineering husband reckons he should be named Gordon, as he is, while her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, reckons the moniker should be Bear. And so Knapp gives us three versions of the boy's life when the family circumstances are at times grim, and his life takes differing paths depending on his name. There's big word of mouth in the publishing world about this sliding doors novel.
Sydney Morning Herald
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Family secrets laid bare, ‘inconvenient women' and a croc attack: 13 new books to delve into
So here we are, going into the last month of autumn and if you're one of those people getting ready to hunker down in the impending cooler weather then there are plenty of new books for you to stock up on. Memoirs, fiction, science, even a controversial posthumous publication − so much to feast on. No wonder May is named after Maia, the Roman goddess for fertility and growth. Always Home, Always Homesick Hannah Kent Picador, $36.99 April 29 Burial Rites, about the last woman executed in Iceland, was one of those books that captured the imagination of readers when it was published in 2013. Now Hannah Kent has written a lovely memoir about the curious path she took to becoming a writer − an exchange program took her as a 17-year-old to Iceland, a country she chose because she had never seen snow. She had the luck, she writes, to be born into a story-loving family and with that legacy has written three novels and now this tender account of how Iceland captivated her and forged her literary career. Desire Paths Megan Clement Ultimo, $36.99 April 29 In her introduction, Megan Clement, who has lived in Australia, France, England and Zimbabwe, writes that 2020 was the year when 'grief' and 'trauma' were dropped into the cultural mainstream. In the course of this touching and carefully constructed memoir of dealing with the stringencies of the Melbourne lockdowns and the impending death of her terminally ill father, she also considers the nature of home, belonging and the meaning and realities of borders. Little World Josephine Rowe Black Inc., $27.99 April 29 Orrin Bird has been left an unusual bequest − the incorruptible body of a saint in a box made of canoe wood. (Remember the saint in Charlotte Wood's Stone Yard Devotional?) The saint was young when thought to have died brutally, but her mind is still active, 'time breaking contract with her body' and 'death has brought very little in the way of answers'. In clear prose, this short, idiosyncratic novel brings us the people with whom the little saint 'travels' through time and landscape, her response to their predicaments and her reflections on her own existence. A remarkable concoction. Everything Lost, Everything Found Matthew Hooton HarperCollins, $34.99 April 30 What was it Faulkner said? 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' The revisiting of earlier events occurs in many novels, and does so again in Matthew Hooton's much-admired third. Jack is 12 years old when his mother is mauled by a croc in the Tapajos River in Brazil. Many years later, Jack, by now a grandfather, recognises he doesn't 'have infinite time to curate my own past' as his wife Gracie 'slips into ever longer states of forgetting'. But how can he come to terms with the past and his present? Lonely Mouth Jacqueline Maley Fourth Estate, $34.99 April 30 The first novel by Jacqueline Maley, columnist with The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, became a bestseller. Her second opens with a paragraph that leaps off the page and plunges you into the story of Matilda, a fry chef at posh Sydney restaurant Bocca, her younger half-sister Lara, a model who lives in Paris, and their flighty mum, Barbara. When Lara's father, the decidedly dodgy actor Angus, reappears in their lives, any sort of equilibrium goes up in smoke. It's hard to put down. Notes to John Joan Didion Fourth Estate, $34.99 April 30 This book is slightly problematic. You wonder whether its author − were she still alive − would have approved of its publication. Joan Didion wrote the adored Year of Magical Thinking, about the 2003 death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. This posthumous book consists of notes addressed to him reporting on sessions with her psychiatrist, and reveals frank comments about their adopted daughter Quintana, alcoholism, depression and much more. If you love Didion, you'll probably want to read this. I Want Everything Dominic Amerena Summit Books, $34.99 April 30 'I acted immorally, but what did literature have to do with morality?' asks the would-be literary star − 'a style machine with no substance' − early in this absorbing novel about truth and ambition. The unnamed narrator stumbles on a controversial, reclusive author − 'sharply chiselled cheekbones, like the bust of a deposed dictator' − and proceeds to try to find out why she disappeared from the public eye. But to woo Brenda's trust, he tells a porky or three, and she might just be leading him on for her own purposes. All will be revealed in Dominic Amerena's delicious debut. The Opposite of Lonely Hilde Hinton Hachette, $32.99 April 30 The world takes its toll and Rose is well aware of that. Somehow, she seems to have shaken off friends, her father has died, her husband is no longer her husband and even her young son Max is trying her patience more than usual. After a near disaster while out shopping, a knight in shining armour comes to the rescue; Ellie, who becomes her new bestie. Loneliness is a curse at the best of times, so a friend indeed for a friend in need is a good thing … usually. Hilde Hinton has written another gentle and perceptive look at the travails of life. Vaccine Nation Raina MacIntyre NewSouth, $34.99 May 1 Biosecurity expert Raina MacIntyre's latest book is a lament at the rise since 2020 of health disinformation and a plea to understand the value of vaccinations given the sad inevitability of a new pandemic. She points out that flu vaccinations in Australia in the over 65s are at 60 per cent, whereas only a few years ago, 70 per cent was the norm. To improve public perception of vaccines and public health, according to MacIntyre, we need 'political will, global cooperation and an integrated approach'. Inconvenient Women Jacqueline Kent NewSouth, $34.99 May 1 Jacqueline Kent's titular women are the 'daughters of the suffragists, the mothers of … 1970s feminists'. These are the writers, ranging from Jean Devanny, author of the controversial The Butcher Shop, to Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal), Katharine Susannah Prichard and Nettie Palmer, who 'used their power with words in support of their beliefs, and to question and change elements of the world'. There are plenty of familiar names, but many not so well known, and Kent brings her cast of writers effortlessly to life. The Power of Choice Julian Kingma NewSouth, $49.99 May 1 Julian Kingma is a wonderful photographer. In this book, he has chosen to photograph terminally ill people who have decided to make use of Voluntary Assisted Dying legislation to ease their anxiety about death and regain dignity through their control of it. His stark black and white images are confronting, tender, beautiful, and terribly revealing. As 82-year-old former yoga teacher Liberty Pack says, 'I have no anxiety. I have a very peaceful feeling about the way my end will be.' The Power of Choice also has short introductions by Andrew Denton and Richard Flanagan. The Emperor of Gladness Ocean Vuong Jonathan Cape, $34.99 May 13 The American poet and novelist won acclaim for his first novel, the brilliantly titled On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, and follows it up with a story that begins with 19-year-old Haia about to jump from a bridge. He is stopped by an old Latvian woman, Grazina, suffering from dementia, who invites the troubled youth to stay with her. Both are struggling, but the connection they form through their friendship − their love − from their particular edges of American society brings meaning to them both. Loading The Names Florence Knapp Phoenix, $32.99 May 13 Does it matter what name you have? In Florence Knapp's first novel, Cora gives birth to a boy and wants to call him Julian. Her domineering husband reckons he should be named Gordon, as he is, while her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, reckons the moniker should be Bear. And so Knapp gives us three versions of the boy's life when the family circumstances are at times grim, and his life takes differing paths depending on his name. There's big word of mouth in the publishing world about this sliding doors novel.
The Age
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Family secrets laid bare, ‘inconvenient women' and a croc attack: 13 new books to delve into
So here we are, going into the last month of autumn and if you're one of those people getting ready to hunker down in the impending cooler weather then there are plenty of new books for you to stock up on. Memoirs, fiction, science, even a controversial posthumous publication − so much to feast on. No wonder May is named after Maia, the Roman goddess for fertility and growth. Always Home, Always Homesick Hannah Kent Picador, $36.99 April 29 Burial Rites, about the last woman executed in Iceland, was one of those books that captured the imagination of readers when it was published in 2013. Now Hannah Kent has written a lovely memoir about the curious path she took to becoming a writer − an exchange program took her as a 17-year-old to Iceland, a country she chose because she had never seen snow. She had the luck, she writes, to be born into a story-loving family and with that legacy has written three novels and now this tender account of how Iceland captivated her and forged her literary career. Desire Paths Megan Clement Ultimo, $36.99 April 29 In her introduction, Megan Clement, who has lived in Australia, France, England and Zimbabwe, writes that 2020 was the year when 'grief' and 'trauma' were dropped into the cultural mainstream. In the course of this touching and carefully constructed memoir of dealing with the stringencies of the Melbourne lockdowns and the impending death of her terminally ill father, she also considers the nature of home, belonging and the meaning and realities of borders. Little World Josephine Rowe Black Inc., $27.99 April 29 Orrin Bird has been left an unusual bequest − the incorruptible body of a saint in a box made of canoe wood. (Remember the saint in Charlotte Wood's Stone Yard Devotional?) The saint was young when thought to have died brutally, but her mind is still active, 'time breaking contract with her body' and 'death has brought very little in the way of answers'. In clear prose, this short, idiosyncratic novel brings us the people with whom the little saint 'travels' through time and landscape, her response to their predicaments and her reflections on her own existence. A remarkable concoction. Everything Lost, Everything Found Matthew Hooton HarperCollins, $34.99 April 30 What was it Faulkner said? 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' The revisiting of earlier events occurs in many novels, and does so again in Matthew Hooton's much-admired third. Jack is 12 years old when his mother is mauled by a croc in the Tapajos River in Brazil. Many years later, Jack, by now a grandfather, recognises he doesn't 'have infinite time to curate my own past' as his wife Gracie 'slips into ever longer states of forgetting'. But how can he come to terms with the past and his present? Lonely Mouth Jacqueline Maley Fourth Estate, $34.99 April 30 The first novel by Jacqueline Maley, columnist with The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, became a bestseller. Her second opens with a paragraph that leaps off the page and plunges you into the story of Matilda, a fry chef at posh Sydney restaurant Bocca, her younger half-sister Lara, a model who lives in Paris, and their flighty mum, Barbara. When Lara's father, the decidedly dodgy actor Angus, reappears in their lives, any sort of equilibrium goes up in smoke. It's hard to put down. Notes to John Joan Didion Fourth Estate, $34.99 April 30 This book is slightly problematic. You wonder whether its author − were she still alive − would have approved of its publication. Joan Didion wrote the adored Year of Magical Thinking, about the 2003 death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. This posthumous book consists of notes addressed to him reporting on sessions with her psychiatrist, and reveals frank comments about their adopted daughter Quintana, alcoholism, depression and much more. If you love Didion, you'll probably want to read this. I Want Everything Dominic Amerena Summit Books, $34.99 April 30 'I acted immorally, but what did literature have to do with morality?' asks the would-be literary star − 'a style machine with no substance' − early in this absorbing novel about truth and ambition. The unnamed narrator stumbles on a controversial, reclusive author − 'sharply chiselled cheekbones, like the bust of a deposed dictator' − and proceeds to try to find out why she disappeared from the public eye. But to woo Brenda's trust, he tells a porky or three, and she might just be leading him on for her own purposes. All will be revealed in Dominic Amerena's delicious debut. The Opposite of Lonely Hilde Hinton Hachette, $32.99 April 30 The world takes its toll and Rose is well aware of that. Somehow, she seems to have shaken off friends, her father has died, her husband is no longer her husband and even her young son Max is trying her patience more than usual. After a near disaster while out shopping, a knight in shining armour comes to the rescue; Ellie, who becomes her new bestie. Loneliness is a curse at the best of times, so a friend indeed for a friend in need is a good thing … usually. Hilde Hinton has written another gentle and perceptive look at the travails of life. Vaccine Nation Raina MacIntyre NewSouth, $34.99 May 1 Biosecurity expert Raina MacIntyre's latest book is a lament at the rise since 2020 of health disinformation and a plea to understand the value of vaccinations given the sad inevitability of a new pandemic. She points out that flu vaccinations in Australia in the over 65s are at 60 per cent, whereas only a few years ago, 70 per cent was the norm. To improve public perception of vaccines and public health, according to MacIntyre, we need 'political will, global cooperation and an integrated approach'. Inconvenient Women Jacqueline Kent NewSouth, $34.99 May 1 Jacqueline Kent's titular women are the 'daughters of the suffragists, the mothers of … 1970s feminists'. These are the writers, ranging from Jean Devanny, author of the controversial The Butcher Shop, to Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal), Katharine Susannah Prichard and Nettie Palmer, who 'used their power with words in support of their beliefs, and to question and change elements of the world'. There are plenty of familiar names, but many not so well known, and Kent brings her cast of writers effortlessly to life. The Power of Choice Julian Kingma NewSouth, $49.99 May 1 Julian Kingma is a wonderful photographer. In this book, he has chosen to photograph terminally ill people who have decided to make use of Voluntary Assisted Dying legislation to ease their anxiety about death and regain dignity through their control of it. His stark black and white images are confronting, tender, beautiful, and terribly revealing. As 82-year-old former yoga teacher Liberty Pack says, 'I have no anxiety. I have a very peaceful feeling about the way my end will be.' The Power of Choice also has short introductions by Andrew Denton and Richard Flanagan. The Emperor of Gladness Ocean Vuong Jonathan Cape, $34.99 May 13 The American poet and novelist won acclaim for his first novel, the brilliantly titled On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, and follows it up with a story that begins with 19-year-old Haia about to jump from a bridge. He is stopped by an old Latvian woman, Grazina, suffering from dementia, who invites the troubled youth to stay with her. Both are struggling, but the connection they form through their friendship − their love − from their particular edges of American society brings meaning to them both. Loading The Names Florence Knapp Phoenix, $32.99 May 13 Does it matter what name you have? In Florence Knapp's first novel, Cora gives birth to a boy and wants to call him Julian. Her domineering husband reckons he should be named Gordon, as he is, while her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, reckons the moniker should be Bear. And so Knapp gives us three versions of the boy's life when the family circumstances are at times grim, and his life takes differing paths depending on his name. There's big word of mouth in the publishing world about this sliding doors novel.
The Age
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
‘I could feel the cold': the dreams that told Hannah Kent what to write
In 2020, Hannah Kent began regularly dreaming of Iceland in a way that was so vivid she could feel the cold wind whipping off the wild northern sea. It wasn't the first time the author had experienced dreams that felt portentous, but with Australia in a COVID lockdown and a new baby also interrupting her sleep, she was left a little shaken. 'There was often a sense of something coming or something that I needed to pay attention to, like the dream was asking something of me,' she says. 'I could feel the cold and I could feel the landscape, and it was in this heightened detail.' She even spoke Icelandic in the dreams: 'It was so peculiar because, in my waking hours, I forget so much … but in my dreams I would be more fluent.' Kent has considered Iceland her second home since she spent a year there as a teenage exchange student in 2003. It provided the setting and idea for her bestselling debut novel Burial Rites, published 10 years later, and she revisits it in her new book, Always Home, Always Homesick. On a sunny autumn morning at a cafe in the leafy Adelaide Hills, near where she grew up and the home she now shares with wife Heidi and their two young children, she reflects that her lockdown dreams were symptomatic of a 'destabilising homesickness' for Iceland. 'Just knowing that I was stuck made me realise how much it meant to me, and even the possibility of Iceland was important to me… not necessarily being there, but just knowing that I could go.' Kent completed her third novel, Devotion, during the pandemic, but the spark had been ignited for Always Home, Always Homesick, a memoir of her time living in Iceland that also illuminates pivotal points in her journey to becoming an author. She recounts how, aged about six and inspired by her love of books, she told her parents she wanted to be a writer. They were encouraging, but suggested that writers often had other jobs as well. Perhaps she could be a writer 'and something else'. In year 12, she was accepted for the local Rotary Club's student exchange program. Young Hannah put Iceland on her list of preferred countries for one reason: snow. 'I'd never seen it before,' she explains with a laugh. 'It always seemed to me such a magical thing. I think like a lot of kids born in the mid- to late '80s, we were fed a pretty steady diet of European literature, and there's a lot of snow.' She ended up in a tiny, remote Icelandic town called Saudarkrokur, which she describes in Always Home, Always Homesick as 'wild with mountains and sky and sea'. 'When I arrived it grew light at around 11 in this very blue, Nordic noir sort of way, and then it would be dark again by three,' she says. 'So you'd have about four hours of daylight, but you wouldn't see the sun because it was hidden behind the mountains … I liked the novelty of that, and I liked the novelty of the wind and the snow and the weather.' Kent has drawn on her talent for lyrical language and a box full of diaries, notebooks and correspondence to create evocative descriptions of Iceland. She immerses readers in the culture – where traditional foods range from fermented shark to boiled potatoes finished in caramel – and daily life with different host families and friends. As she fell in love with Iceland, she became inspired by the country's strong literary culture. 'I remember going visiting with people, and you're in the middle of nowhere, in a tiny little old farmhouse, and the place is just heaving with books – and people are reading them, too. 'I realised that it was possible to actually be quite serious about writing… without feeling like you had to cringe or apologise for having this kind of artistic ambition.' On a road trip during her exchange, Kent saw the site where a young woman, Agnes Magnúsdóttir, had been executed for murder alongside her co-accused in 1830. Iceland is full of stories and sagas, but Agnes got a hold on Hannah. Much later, while doing her honours in creative writing back in Adelaide, she decided to write a novel based on the condemned woman's life, beginning an exhaustive research process that included further trips to Iceland. The first draft of Burial Rites – a multi-award-winning book translated into more than 30 languages – was written while she was living in a share-house in Melbourne. Three years after Burial Rites came Kent's second historical novel, The Good People, which is inspired by Irish folklore. Devotion, published in 2021 and set between 19th-century Prussia and South Australia, ventures into magical realism to tell the story of the unbreakable bond between two women. TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO HANNAH KENT Worst habit? Biting my nails. Drinking too much coffee. Greatest fear? Something happening to my children. Environmental catastrophe. The line that stayed with you? 'There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places.' From Wendell Berry's How to Be a Poet. Biggest regret? I don't have many, but I've occasionally worried about what others think. I regret wasting energy on that. Favourite book? Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. The artwork/song you wish was yours? Can I choose an album? Tea for the Tillerman by Yusuf / Cat Stevens. If you could time travel, where would you choose to go? I already time travel – I read. I go everywhere. Kent says it is only relatively recently that she realised how Iceland not only solidified her decision to be a writer, but also influenced the types of stories in which she is interested. 'I really love the way in which a lot of these slightly more mythical, disturbing, inexplicable stories in Iceland are presented to you as fact. It's just incorporated into the greater mysteries of life.' She has described Devotion as her love letter to Heidi, whom she met in Melbourne in 2016 after being encouraged by friends to try online dating. 'Heidi was the first person I agreed to meet up with, and then I just deleted the app,' she says of their instant connection. 'It really freaked me out. I was just like, 'Oh, it's you' – like I recognised her.' Heidi proposed on the day Australians voted 'Yes' to marriage equality, and Hannah's Icelandic host parents travelled to Australia for their wedding. The couple moved to Peramangk Country in the Adelaide Hills to raise their two children, Anouk, seven, and Rory, five. Loading Both kids share Kent's obsession with snow, and she hopes that when they are older, the family might spend some time living in Iceland. Anouk and Rory also love books. 'They've been read to every single night. We have a thing called family book, where we all pile into our bed and I will read to them because I do all the voices.' The film rights have been sold to all three of Kent's novels, and after writing the screenplay for the 2023 horror movie Run Rabbit Run, starring Sarah Snook, she is now working on the screen adaptations of The Good People and Devotion. She's also focused on her next book, which will be another novel. When I comment that she didn't end up needing a second career option – to be 'a writer and something else' – Kent laughs. 'I still think of 'ands'. For many years, I was going to be a pastry chef – I love cooking,' she says, adding that at various points she also considered teaching and medicine, and last year worked for a while in the bookshop just up the street from where we're sitting. 'I cast my net super-wide,' she says. 'I've always been slightly neurotic about how long I'm going to be able to write, so it's good to have back-up plans.'
