Get to know our author of our book of the month for November, Heather Rose. Heather Rose is the Australian author of nine novels. Her most recent novel, Bruny, won the 2020 ABIA General Fiction Book of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for an Indie Book Award and Davitt Award. Her seventh novel, The Museum of Modern Love, won the 2017 Stella Prize. It also won the 2017 Christina Stead Prize and the 2017 Margaret Scott Prize. It has been published internationally and translated into numerous languages. Both The Museum of Modern Love and The Butterfly Man were longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. The Butterfly Man won the Davitt Award in 2006, and in 2007 The River Wife won the international Varuna Eleanor Dark Fellowship. Heather has also written for younger readers under the pen-name Angelica Banks with Danielle Woods. The series has been published internationally and shortlisted twice for the Aurealis Awards for best children’s fantasy. The memoir Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here was shortlisted for the nonfiction prize in the Indie Book Awards in 2022. Heather lives in Tasmania.
- To begin with why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself – where were you born, raised, schooled?
I was born in Hobart, Tasmania, the third of four children. I was raised within a colourful community of family and friends. We lived very close to the sea, and we had a shack by the sea, so ocean and sky, birds and breeze, sailing, fishing, and forest walks, reading, and being outdoors every chance we could get, that all raised me too. On balance I have spent more time in the public school system than private. And I don’t have a university degree. Travel seemed so much more important when I was young.
2. What did you want to be when you were twelve, eighteen and thirty? And why?
Ah, such a fascinating question. At twelve I wanted to be a writer. At eighteen a Buddhist nun. At thirty, cat woman. A novelist cat woman.
3. What were three works of art – book or painting or piece of music, etc – you can now say had a great effect on you and influenced your own development as a writer?
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Chris Isaak’s music while driving across America in my 20’s. (Road music dreaming is very useful for writing.) And Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Joy is always good. In truth, despite my love of art, music and literature, theatre and film… nature has been my greatest artistic influence. Clouds, seascapes, frogs singing, sunsets and sunrises, terrain, moonscapes and seasons.
4. Please tell us about your novel (which is also our BOTM!), A Great Act of Love.
A Great Act of Love travels from the French Revolution to colonial Australia. It’s a novel of reinvention, Along the way we meet a young boy called Quill sold into servitude on a merchant vessel, Cornelius – a slave stolen from Africa to work in the Caribbean, Henriette – a rather spectacular thief, and a decorated military man from the British wars in India who becomes one of the most powerful men in the colony of Van Diemen’s Land. It is history woven into fiction and fiction woven through history. Much of it is based on true events – and much of it is purely imagined. At its heart is Caroline, trained by her father to be an apothecarist in London, who loses everything in the course of a few short years – but travels to Van Diemen’s Land to rebuild a life – only to discover that the past is always with us, inspiring us, haunting us, and drawing us back to the people we love.
5. What do you hope people take away with them after reading your work?
Life is an invention and is richest when inspired by love, courage and curiosity. This book invited me to understand that all humans are survivors of immense hardship and violence, if we look back far enough into history. It’s good to understand that, to understand the cultural and social impact we have made, and to find a way to live with the difficult truths of the past. Courage is an act of love.
6. Whom do you most admire in the realm of writing and why?
This could be a very long list. I am always discovering new writers and also revisiting favourite books. But here are a few …
Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner for dialogue and character.
Maggie O’Farrell and Virginia Woolf for the beauty of their craft.
Tom Robbins for wondrous imagination and hilarity.
Haruki Murakami for strange compelling worlds.
The Bronte sisters, Jane Austen and George Eliot for audacious clever writing.
Margaret Atwood for the breadth and scope of her books.
7. What advice do you give aspiring writers?
Before you can become a writer you must become a prolific reader.
Pay attention to what terrifies you about writing.
Find a question that compels you to discovery.
A Great Act Of Love
From the award-winning author of The Museum of Modern Love and Bruny comes an enthralling tale of legacy, love and the making of champagne.
Caroline will tell the story of how she came to Tasmania, when it was still called Van Diemen's Land, many times. She will cast her inventions into the future. Those who carry them on will call it history, but she will call it her life.
Van Diemen's Land, 1839. A young woman of means arrives in Hobart, with a young boy in her care. Leasing an old cottage next to an abandoned vineyard, Caroline Douglas must navigate an insular colony of exiles and opportunists to create a new life on this island of extreme seasons and wild beauty. But Caroline is carrying a secret of such magnitude it has led her to cross the world, and it will take all she is made of to bring it into the light.
Soaring from the champagne vineyards of revolutionary France to London and early colonial Australia, A Great Act of Love is a spellbinding novel of legacy, passion and reinvention. At its heart is a family with champagne in their blood and a fearless daughter determined to rewrite fate.
Inspired by true events, A Great Act of Love is an immensely beautiful and heartrending saga of a father and daughter, and the enduring power of familial love.
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