Latest news with #HannahKent
NZ Herald
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
Book of the day: Always Homes, Always Homesick by Hannah Kent
It's necessary to summarise this memoir in some detail, because its slowly cohering narrative is its essence. It's the back story of Aussie Hannah Kent's deservedly acclaimed first novel, Burial Rites. A bit over two decades ago, the teenaged Kent flew to Iceland as an exchange student. She found herself
ABC News
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
On stage at Melbourne Writers' Festival with Hannah Kent and Beejay Silcox
A live recording from Melbourne Writers' Festival as Hannah Kent and Beejay Silcox sit down with Kate Evans and Jonathan Green to discuss the latest fiction releases they're enjoying, loving and being challenged by. BOOKS - Hannah Kent, Always Home, Always Homesick, Picador - Eimear McBride, The City Changes its Face, Faber - Susan Choi, Flashlight, Jonathan Cape - Edward St Aubyn, Parallel Lines, Jonathan Cape - Caryl Phillips, Another Man in the Street, Bloomsbury GUESTS Hannah Kent, novelist whose books are Burial Rites, The Good People and Devotion – and whose memoir, Always Home, Always Homesick – has just been published. Beejay Silcox, critic and writer. Festival director, literary interviewer and one of the inaugural recipients of the Frank Moorhouse Reading Room writing residency OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay Eric Puchner, Dream State Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers Emily Maguire, Rapture Mariana Enríquez, A Sunny Place for Shady People Susan Hampton, Anything Can Happen
ABC News
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Ghost stories and executions in Iceland — when Hannah Kent and Agnes Magnusdottir became entwined
Hannah Kent's arrival in Iceland as a high school exchange student in 2003 was a difficult one. On her first night in the country, she found herself stranded late at night at Keflavik Airport and desperately homesick. But within weeks, Iceland had begun to change young Hannah — its dramatic landscapes, extraordinary light and chilling ghost stories embedded themselves in Hannah's psyche. She became particularly entranced with the haunting story of accused murderer and domestic servant, Agnes Magnusdottir, who became the last person executed in Iceland. Hannah's later novel, Burial Rites, was inspired by Agnes' story and became a best-seller. But there were many unsolvable mysteries that lingered in her mind years after that book was released. Hannah returned to Iceland to find answers, and discovered her life was still entwined with Agnes in strange and eerie ways. Further information This episode of Conversations was recorded live at the 2025 Melbourne Writers Festival. Always Home, Always Homesick is published by Pan Macmillan
The Guardian
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Always Home, Always Homesick by Hannah Kent review – absorbing memoir brings Iceland to life
The first part of Hannah Kent's memoir Always Home, Always Homesick spans the award-winning author's early childhood in Adelaide through to her first trip to Iceland as a 17-year-old Rotary exchange student, in 2003. Aged four, Hannah is friendless, 'illiterate in a common tongue of childhood'. In books, she finds refuge and relief. As a teenager, she is annoyed by adults' talk of Atars, harbouring a grander aspiration: to awaken to the 'divine mystery' of the world. The promotional material for Always Home, Always Homesick frames Iceland as Kent's muse, spurring not only her award-winning debut Burial Rites but also the literary practice that spawned subsequent novels The Good People and Devotion. And indeed, the place feels personified in this memoir. As though she were falling for a full-blooded human, the young Kent progresses from initial awkwardness in her new surrounds to physical infatuation, 'euphoric sublimation' to its beauty, and eventually, a kind of enmeshment: 'My bones have knitted with this place.' Returning to Australia, she is beset by longing and grief. Inseparable from Kent's enchantment with Iceland is her own artistic blossoming, making this first section of the memoir read like a Künstlerroman. Encouraged by a kindly teacher in Sauðárkrókur (the small northern town where she has been posted), she scrawls poems in class and the act gives her a 'physical rush'. Writing, she says, is her 'calling', and 'feels like prayer'. There are frequent moments of epiphany, brought about through contact with the natural world – horse-riding, gathering berries, lying against the snow. Facing an aurora-rippled sky, she writes: 'I long to fit these swerving arcs of brilliant green … into language.' For it is only through writing that Kent can attempt to 'articulate the hold' Iceland has on her. The second part of the memoir sees Kent return to Iceland in her 20s, with a sharpening resolve to research and write about Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last person to be executed in that country, in 1830. On the face of it, the figure of Agnes is at great remove from Kent; even if she weren't, a writer writing about their own writing process could risk alienating the general reader. But Kent's gift is to bridge these apparent distances. As with Agnes' voice in Burial Rites, Kent's narration here is immediate, intimate and never less than captivating. For a description of an extended, conceptual process, Kent's account feels startlingly physical. She visits the kinds of dwellings Agnes would have inhabited; she finds examples of objects – axes, needles, butter churns – that will make her book 'as real as possible'; she gathers stories directly from farmers in their cow stalls; she handles original letters at the national archives and carries out her own translations. She applies what she has learned experientially in her exchange year – about family, and land, and isolation – to illuminate Agnes' story. This behind-the-scenes view of the artist at work is interesting in its own right, but especially fascinating is Kent's personal closeness to the historical figure of Agnes, who has a 'continued, humming hold' over her. At times, Kent's feelings drift into identification, but this is done with careful understatement. Discovering that Agnes spent her final six months with a local family, for example, Kent draws a parallel to being placed with a host family: 'I know it is not the same, but I know a little of what it is like to be alone among others … to be placed with strangers.' Following Burial Rites' publication in 2013, Kent gained access to court documents associated with a mock retrial of Agnes' case. She was struck by how close her invented details were to these transcripts, and surely this is testament to the author's imaginative and empathetic powers. Australian authors waxing lyrical about foreign locations can often lapse into idealisation. But when Kent describes Iceland as her true home, and says she finds it easier to be herself there, these feel like genuine, hard-won truths. Thanks to her gradual acculturation as a high-school student, she is fluent in Icelandic and counts various locals as family. There is a decidedly Romantic bent to Kent's writing – a lyrical treatment of nature; frequent reference to the liminal. But this is in keeping with her highly sensitive disposition as well as Icelanders' own interest in the mythic and the uncanny. As a novelist, Kent is interested in 'what is unsaid', and this too chimes with something in the Icelandic psyche and its 'tradition of silence'. On her most recent trip to Iceland, captured in the third and final part of the memoir, Kent visits the site of Agnes' execution, which has been made into a memorial. She is moved to find plaques lining the pathway engraved with lines from her novel. It's a beautiful scene, with a strange symmetry: an imprinting of the author's own imaginative spirit on to a place which has so deeply imprinted itself on her. Always Home, Always Homesick is an absorbing memoir that will appeal to existing readers of Kent's work, and will undoubtedly see new ones seek out her earlier writing in all its mystery and glory. Always Home, Always Homesick by Hannah Kent is out through Pan Macmillan Australia ($36.99)
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.'
