About Hannah Kent: Hannah Kent is a contemporary Australian writer, and the author of the bestselling novel Burial Rites (2013).
I was a very imaginative child, and my parents were very encouraging of that. My sister and I would put on plays; I would write my own stories.
I had an interest in Scandinavian countries because I'd never seen snow.
I still don't know why, exactly, but I do think people can have a spiritual connection to landscape, and I certainly did in Iceland.
Most writers are drawn to what is unknown, rather than what is clear in any tale.
There are secrets at the heart of every story; there is something that must be uncovered or discovered, both by the reader and by the characters.
The mystery at the center of 'Burial Rites' is not who killed whom on the night of March 13, 1828. It is the mystery each of us encounters: Can we every truly know another? Can we ever truly know ourselves?
I always knew I wanted to be a writer. I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do as a money-making job.
In Iceland, you can see the contours of the mountains wherever you go, and the swell of the hills, and always beyond that the horizon. And there's this strange thing: you're never sort of hidden; you always feel exposed in that landscape. But it make...
