First Things First

All this week I’ll be blogging from the Melbourne Writers' Festival. It’s the first time I’ve been to Melbourne, my first festival, (to speak about my first novel, AFTER THE FIRE, A STILL SMALL VOICE) and the first time my partner is seeing Australia.  

Forty years ago my mother brought my English father to Australia to meet her family; he was horrified when a restaurant served him poached eggs with chips and beetroot and never really recovered. I’m happy to say things seem to be going better this time around. We’ve spent a week in Sydney, eating our way through jetlag, in between visits to bookshops and occasional meetings with book people. My partner ate his first Sydney rock oyster, and since then we’ve had prawns and blue swimmers and all the other fish in between with barely a pause for breath. Two days ago, I watched as he ate a bright orange piece of freshly cracked sea urchin straight from my uncle’s knife.  

It seems odd to be here again after spending so much time thinking, writing and talking about Australia in London. When I started work on my book four years ago, I began teasing my partner with family stories of going out past the breakers where the sharks take you away, the agony of treading on a stone fish and what to do to avoid being chased by a brown snake. In the end he was disappointed not to see thousands of sharks moiling around in the water in Darling Harbour. He thought they’d ‘just be there, looking at you’.  

It seems equally odd that after so much time spent working alone and writing about people characterized by silence and miscommunication that I’m here to be professionally ‘in conversation’. It’s often remarked upon as strange that we expect writers to be good talkers and I’ve certainly found that standing up in front of an audience and speaking (the idea of which used to bring me out in a cold sweat) has been a massively challenging part of being a published author. Over the next few days I’ll speak in front of the largest audiences that I’ve ever encountered and I’ll write to let you know how it goes. I only hope that it’s more sea urchin than beetroot.

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