Following on from last month's interview with the Metro, Australian author Kate Grenville has featured in two British newspapers and an Irish one to promote her new novel Sarah Thornhill. Here's a round-up of those interviews:
Grenville is one of Australia’s finest writers, famous in her hometown Sydney. But on both sides of her family, she can trace her roots back to Britain and her writing is equally acclaimed here. Her 2001 novel, The Idea of Perfection, won the Orange prize and her best-known novel, The Secret River, was shortlisted for the Man Booker.
Read the full interview at The Telegraph
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Following the publication of The Secret River, two Australian academics attacked Grenville and her novel in what she describes as "the most extraordinarily virulent terms". "I was seen as invading the territory of historians," she says. "In fact I'm just doing what writers since Homer and before have done, which is to take real events and adapt them".
Both The Secret River and The Lieutenant suffered as a result of this fuss, Grenville now feels, and Sarah Thornhill is pointedly billed as "a work of fiction that takes the past as its starting point." But Grenville seemingly harbours no bitterness, seeing the controversy as symptomatic. "It's a lot easier just to talk about whether this is fiction or history, than to take on board the very difficult and painful things that I'm actually writing about."
Read the full interview at The Independent (but do ignore the terribly sexist headline)
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The Australian novelist Kate Grenville smiles broadly on hearing that she looks Irish. “Funny you should say that. As I was sitting on the Aer Lingus flight coming over here, I thought that most of the passengers could easily pass for Australians. But then there is a huge Irish presence in Australia.” From the opening comment of the interview, history is a factor.
Read the full review at the Irish Times
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