Always Home, Always Homesick shares Kent’s love affair with Iceland and the journey of her writing. She talks about her childhood passion to write with creative freedom and her struggles to keep writing, culminating in an award-winning debut novel, Burial Rights. A haunting, grisly history of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last woman to be executed in Iceland, demonised in her lifetime.
At 17 years of age, Kent, an Australian exchange student who wants to see snow, arrives in Iceland for a year, in the middle of winter at a small town near the Arctic Circle – Sauðárkrókur. The map supplied is helpful.
Kent immerses us in this magical, otherworldly landscape by evocative, poetic prose. The wind is a sentient being and the Northern Lights and the snow are terribly beautiful. It’s a challenge to put these experiences into words.
But a traditional winter meal with her quiet, orderly host family includes rotten shark, lambs’ testicles, and boiled sheep head, and Kent experiences her first forceful wave of homesickness. When she moves to another host family with children, she feels accepted, and starts to enjoy the vastly different language. Iceland becomes her second home. She returns another four times after the exchange.
This land compels her to write about Agnes who captures her mind. She dreams of Agnes and records her dreams in a journal. Dreams and ghosts are a part of Icelandic culture, seen as symbols or prophecies, and they inflame her imagination.
Kent describes her research for Burial Rights in great detail, balancing fiction with facts. The Art Museum’s poignant display on capital punishment, visits to graves, the National Archives, the block and axe where Agnes was killed, enveloped in the eerie landscape, bring her novel to life.
This enjoyable memoir is a love letter to her second family and to Iceland, a nation of storytellers, which gave her the inspiration to keep writing.
Reviewed by Judith Grace
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hannah Kent’s first novel, the international bestseller, Burial Rites (2013), was translated into over 30 languages and won the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year, the Indie Awards Debut Fiction Book of the Year, and the Victorian Premier’s People’s Choice Award. It was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Guardian First Book Award, the Stella Prize, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, amongst others. It is currently being adapted for film by Sony TriStar.
Hannah’s second novel, The Good People (2016) has been translated into 10 languages and was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Award for Historical Fiction, the Indie Books Award for Literary Fiction, the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year, and the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction. It is currently being adapted for film by Aquarius Productions.
Hannah’s latest novel, Devotion (2021) won Booktopia’s Favourite Australian Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Indie Book Awards for Literary Fiction, and the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year. It is currently being adapted for film by Dollhouse Pictures.
Hannah’s original feature film, Run Rabbit Run, starring Sarah Snook (Succession), was directed by Daina Reid (The Handmaid’s Tale) and produced by Carver and XYZ Films.
Hannah lives and works on Peramangk Country in South Australia.
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