With no proper childcare, she gave up after eight months, but there was enough money to build a house at Mona Vale. Grenville's early fiction presented characters trying to free themselves from social and gender stereotypes. It was the time of the Reconciliation movement – that got a lot of us thinking. A polished gem of a novel by a writer who is as brave as she is insightful. We’re noticing many emerging Australian writers right now. 4. I simply loved it.’ Clare Wright, ‘Her fiction is always a challenge, a goad to our complacencies, social decorums and repressions…Richly imagined…[Provides] the shock we perhaps need to remind us of what might still be possible.’ Age/Sydney Morning Herald. For the first time she feels "eagerness without anxiety" about writing and a new novel is taking shape. After two more bouts, she is well for now and credits a "slightly weird" paleo diet, which is gluten-free and seed-free. Surprisingly, the author has left herself out of the story. This is the flipside of the official story of the early settlement in Sydney and Paramatta and particularly Capt John Macarthur and his role in bringing merinos to Australia and setting up the wool industry. He acted as we all do out of his own experience, which went right back to his childhood.". Grenville's "jokey" father was an important influence, too. At the same time she was a pioneer – a pharmacist at a time when hardly any women had professional training, a woman who ran her own successful businesses, at a time when women were supposed to stay home, and a feminist before there was really a word for it. ‘There is no doubt Grenville is one of our greatest writers’ Sunday Mail, ‘Kate Grenville is a literary alchemist, turning the leaden shadow of the historical Elizabeth Macarthur into a luminescent, golden woman for our times. In 2017 Grenville was awarded the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. There's Solomon Wiseman and Sarah Thornhill, and then two generations, and then my mother. Without wanting to sound too Pollyannaish, we have an unusual but extremely workable, warm sense of a family; maybe a tribe is a better word. She loves the symmetry of the instrument and its deep, human tones; an echo, perhaps, of her own mellow voice. At university, Grenville had dropped the awkward surname Gee and taken her grandmother's maiden name, which was also her father's middle name. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions. She gives a tantalising smile. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. ", The published book is draft 27, which Grenville says is about normal for her. She had also taped conversations with Nance over more than 20 years. Writers are always re-inventing what books can do, and readers are eagerly following. In 2006 Kate Grenville was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the NSW Premier's Literary Award for The Secret River, and the novel was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It provides a different perspective on the early settlement of Australia by the British and paints the life of a remarkable woman. Nance opened a second pharmacy, where Grenville sat behind the counter as a small child and watched her mother "being efficient" in a white coat - "a fantastic image for a girl child to grow up with". I think The Secret River just happened to be the right book at the right time. I feel vindicated in the opinion I have had of John MacArthur since I immersed myself in Australian history in my early teens some 50 or more years ago. Intelligent, compassionate, strategic and dead sexy, Grenville’s Macarthur is an unforgettable character who makes us question everything we thought we knew about our colonial past. As we continue to talk over lunch at a cafe, she scrapes out the tomato and cucumber seeds from her salad. Her descriptions of pseudo fact woven from real, incidents and people are in themselves convincing and could easily be an alternative truth. There are traces of Nance's influence throughout her daughter's writing, and at last she takes the limelight in Grenville's 14th book, One Life: My Mother's Story, published next week. And other recent arrivals—Thomas Blackwood, Smasher Sullivan and Mrs Herring—are finding their own ways to respond to them.Thornhill, a man neither better nor worse than most, soon has to make the most difficult choice of his life.‘Fabulous historical fiction.’, Kate Grenville is one of Australia’s most celebrated writers.

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