About Hannah Kent: Hannah Kent is a contemporary Australian writer, and the author of the bestselling novel Burial Rites (2013).
I could flee to the heath. Show them that they cannot keep me locked up, that I am a thief of time and will steal the hours denied to me!
How can I say what it was like to breathe again? I felt newborn. I staggered in the light of the world and took deep gulps of fresh sea air. It was late in the day: the wet mouth of the afternoon was full on my face. My soul blossomed in that brief m...
Endless days of dark indoors and hateful glances are enough to set a rime on anyone’s bones.
Agnes: "I have a question for you, speaking of truth. You say God speaks the truth." Tóti: "Yes." Agnes: "And God said: 'Thou shalt not kill.' Tóti: "Yes. Tóti said carefully." Agnes: "Then Blondal and the rest are going against God. They're hypoc...
Together they listed the people they had known who had died on the mountains. A bleak conversation to have, thought Margrét, but there was some comfort in talking about death aloud, as though in naming things, you could prevent them from happening.
Sometimes, people never stood a chance in the beginning. Or they might have made a mistake. When people start saying things like she must be a bad mother because of that mistake." .... "It's not fair. People claim to know you through the things you'v...
Poverty scrapes these homes down until they all look the same, and they all have in common the absence of things that ought to be there. I might as well have been at one place all my life.
Blíndur er bóklaus ma∂ur. Blind is a man without a book.
I prefer a story to a prayer.
I used to have 20/20 vision, believe it or not; that's gone because of all the reading I did when I wasn't supposed to, reading in the back of a car, waiting for each street light to go past so I could grab another sentence.
My dad would tell me bedtime stories, and he used to always leave them open-ended and finish at a crucial point with the words, 'dream on'. Then it was my responsibility to finish the story as I was drifting off to sleep. We would call them dreaming ...
You know you're going to have a good day when your morning begins with breakfast in the same room as Carrie Tiffany, David Vann and Lionel Shriver.
People speak of the fear of the blank canvas as though it is a temporary hesitation, a trembling moment of self-doubt. For me it was more like being abducted from my bed by a clown, thrust into a circus arena with a wicker chair, and told to tame a p...
I have a deep and ongoing love of Iceland, particular the landscape, and when writing 'Burial Rites,' I was constantly trying to see whether I could distill its extraordinary and ineffable qualities into a kind of poetry.
I first heard the story of Agnes Magnusdottir when I was an exchange student in the north of Iceland.
I applied for funding to embark on an overseas field trip in Iceland, and spent six weeks there happily holed up in the national archives, museums and libraries, sifting through ministerial and parish records, censuses, maps, microfilm, logs, and loc...
I had expected that at some point during the first draft a light would go on, and I would understand, finally, how to write a book. This never happened. The process was akin to blindly walking in the dark, feeling my way only by touch, and only recog...
I really hate the term 'historical novel' - it reminds me of bodice-rippers. But I'm hooked on research, and I really, really enjoy it.
I don't like to pretend I was guided in any way by the supernatural world, but the more you talk about that, the easier it is to dismiss those notions.
When I write, I write for myself, and I have high expectations... so I'm just trying to meet those. I'm not going to distract myself with other people's expectations.