I stopped this Chinese tourist the other day at Bondi to take a photo of his t-shirt. He and his girlfriend thought it hilarious, proudly telling me the t-shirt was made in China. 'Other people have laughed. You're the first to take photo,' he said. It...
You never know what you’re going to do to research a book. For The Pagoda Tree I’ve shared my hotel room with a rat, ridden on a bullock cart, met a prince and driven all night from Delhi Claire on the back of a bullock cart,...
Writing something short can be as hard or harder as working on a long sprawling project like a novel. But in the process of whittling down your words, you get to the heart of your story. I realised this putting together my book trailer for The...
In a recent video interview with the Australian Writers’ Centre I was asked how I write about other cultures. The pitfalls, the pleasures. And how writing about my Indian characters in The Pagoda Tree differed from writing about Ani, the Tibetan nun, in Last Seen...
The first question a journalist asked me last week was why I made the decision to write my new book as fiction. Why I made the leap. Although Last Seen in Lhasa is a travel memoir, I used fictional techniques — creating character, plenty of dialogue...
To make the publisher’s deadline for my new novel, I’ve been through an intense period of editing. At times it felt like running a marathon – except the finish line kept getting further away. At the end, when I should have had my feet up, I...
Hello everyone, I’ve been quiet for a while. After working on my novel for two years, I’m excited to announce that it’s nearly ready for publication. The Pagoda Tree will be published on 26th June 2013 by Penguin. As I needed to create space for the...