He wrote 10 books in the 1980s, and it is striking how he still sees writing as both a pleasure and an economic necessity; for all his talk about bobbing in the surf, he hasn't got a lot of truck with artistic pretension. Failing to finish a book means having to "make up the income some other way", and in his 20s and 30s that simply wasn't an option. He had three desks, he once said, because "I couldn't afford to get stuck and give a project a week or two of mechanical diagnostics. So I'd have a kids' thing" - he's written six children's books - "a short story and a fiction thing [on the go], or two fiction things and a kids' thing and it was 'right, not working', just slide the chair over and go 'where was I?'"...
Australasia: June 2008 Archives
The Incomparable Sonya Hartnett reviewed by Linda Newbery
Hartnett, who earlier this year won Sweden's Astrid Lindgren memorial award, has the keen eye and freshness of vision to make the most ordinary event spring off the page. The flames of a gas fire "jump up like can-can dancers". Peake, the dog, has "treacle-coloured eyes, and a spiky moustache of wet whiskers after rummaging in the grass". The rhythms of her prose ask to be read aloud, always a test of good writing. "How does one craft sturdy happiness out of something as important, as complicated, as unrepeatable and as easily damaged as a life?" Maddy wonders as a child. "Is love the answer, or freedom from love?" Can a busy life compensate for searing loss? It's a story that seems bigger than its generously spaced 192 pages, and the stylised illustrations by Jon McNaught - waders silhouetted on a shore, dolphins thronging in a yacht's wake, a cloud of butterflies - add to the sense of travelling through a world both familiar and strange.
Sophie Masson writes about creating book trailers on her blog.
Here's one she made herself:
insideadog Writer In Residence
is currently Jenny Valentine, author of the Guardian Award-winning Finding Violet Park and Broken Soup.
