“I mean the beauty of being a writer is it's not like being a swimmer. When they were talking about our Olympic swimmers and they'd say, 'Oh she's so old, ' and she's all of 25 or something. So the beauty for a writer is that you can keep doing it right into your dotage, and I hope to be able to keep doing it as long as I can get away with it, yeah.”
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I knew I was going to be a journalist when I was eight years old and I saw the printing presses rolling at the Sydney newspaper where my dad worked as a proofreader.
The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.
Men can absent themselves from real life for their art more easily. Women are anchored into the quotidian business of getting food on the table, making sure everybody's socks match, the soccer gear is ready. I admire idealists, but they're usually enabled by someone who holds the tether on their balloon, who pays the bills and sweeps up after them.
There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all, and that's where imagination can work.