The Writer Laid Bare

When I arrived in central Australia in 1999, I fell in love with the place I’d entered – a world that seemed to both exist in the country we call Australia, as well as spin on its own axis. From …

A few minutes after signing the publishing contract for my memoir, Ten Thousand Aftershocks, once the euphoria subsided, the reality of what I had done descended. The manuscript I had written at my kitchen counter and on my couch, …

When lockdown began in 2020, I was planning a trip to France to resume research on a biography I had been worrying away at for an embarrassing length of time, having won the Hazel Rowley Fellowship.

This was my first …

During the final editing phase of my debut collection of fiction, Broken Rules and Other Stories, I decided to discuss a last-minute change of some character names with my partner while we were washing up after dinner. I described …

When my children asked me to write the story of my early life, I put off the task for many years. Did I really want to revisit that traumatic time when, as an adolescent in the fifties, I suffered from …

I wrote my latest novel, Like Mother, in what I call a ‘white heat’. No plotting, no Proust-like interviews of characters to find out their favourite foods, and no research. Just the white page (or screen, let’s be honest I gave …