Light in the dark

HANNAH Kent's debut novel – based on a 19th century murder in Iceland – has changed her life

HANNAH Kent's debut novel – based on a 19th century murder in Iceland – has changed her life

The novel had been a decade in gestation. It finally emerged after an intense five months’ writing to an urgent deadline for her creative writing PhD thesis at Flinders University. She had no inkling then that the manuscript would go on to become the subject of an international auction for the publishing rights that would net her an Australian record $1 million-plus advance.

At what point, one wonders, did she realise that she had created such a gem? Not ever, she replies. “Margaret Atwood has this lovely phrase,” she says. “When you’re the writer of the book you’re never going to be charmed by it because you know how the rabbits are smuggled into the hat. You can’t ever sit back and objectively evaluate it.

"I know when I can be content with something … but I’d never think ‘Oh God this is amazing, everyone must read it’.”

The excitement that followed her Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Award in 2011, which brought with it a mentorship with Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Geraldine Brooks and the subsequent auction is building again as the release date for Burial Rites draws closer. It’s expected to arrive in bookshops early next week.

Kent has just turned 28. The financial security afforded her by her advance has allowed her to quit her job teaching in her old department at Flinders to complete the work of editing Burial Rites for its Australian and US publication, and to work on the second novel that is part of the deal. In person, she is composed, with a slightly scholarly turn of phrase and a pretty, girlish face made only slightly serious when she dons heavy-framed spectacles. We are sitting on the veranda of her parents’ Adelaide Hills home.

Her own place, which she shares with her partner in the next village, is being painted. From the house, the grounds follow a steep slope to a dam and a towering oak tree with a table tucked into the deep shade. It was there, as a child, that a young Hannah would spend hours scribbling away in her notebook.

“I always knew I wanted to be a writer,” she says. “I just wasn’t sure what I wanted to do as a money-making job.” She had accepted from an early age that while writing would be her passion, she would make a living doing something else. “And I was completely fine about that,” she says.

“So of course it’s wonderful to be offered any money for your work. Obviously I remain to this day very, very grateful that (publishers) were as passionate and as eager as they were. And I recognise that it was an unusual position to be in.”

Burial Rites is based on a case – as famous in Iceland as the Ned Kelly story is in Australia – involving the murder of two men in the remote north of the country in 1829. One of the accused, a servant woman called Agnes Magnusdottir, was the last prisoner to be executed in Iceland.

How an Adelaide Hills girl came to write a novel about an early-19th century murder in Iceland is a story in itself. At 17, Kent was fresh out of Heathfield High School and keen for adventure. She applied for a Rotary Exchange scholarship, and indicated her interest in travelling somewhere to Scandinavia.

She had never seen snow. “At one of the final rounds of interviews there were three men in front of me,” she recalls. “And they said ‘Hannah how would you feel if you went somewhere where in winter it was dark pretty much 24 hours a day?’ And I said ‘oh, I think that would be so interesting. I’d be delighted to give that a go’.”

That was how, in January 2002, she was transported from an Australian summer into deepest winter in Sauðárkrókur, an isolated fishing village in the north of Iceland that would be her home for the next 12 months. The novelty of the permanent darkness quickly wore off.

She had not a word of Icelandic, her host family was not the warmest and their only child, a teenage boy, refused to speak to the new arrival. She became homesick and intensely lonely. Her foreignness made her paradoxically isolated and conspicuous in such a small community. “I’d be walking to school and people would pull up in cars to get a good look at the exchange student in town, but no one would speak to me. So it was very weird,” she says.

It was in those difficult first months that, on a trip further north, she encountered the site of Agnes Magnusdottir’s execution and began to learn some of the details of the case.

In her book, Kent vividly evokes the similar paradox of Agnes’s final months, deeply isolated because of her crime but also intensely conspicuous in the small community where she is placed in custody to await her execution. “This idea of being very lonely in a hostile, dark landscape,” she says.

“I saw something of myself and my own condition, just a tiny fragment, mirrored back to me, which was comforting at that time, to know that others had been in a situation obviously far worse than mine, but had in a similar way been so conspicuous but at the same time entirely avoided.”

The upside to the prolonged darkness and isolation was that she took refuge in writing, reigniting her passion for the craft, and on long, lonely walks outside the village discovered a love for the Icelandic landscape that has never left her and which she so effectively drew upon to create the vivid sense of place in her novel.

“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,” she says. “And there’s this strange thing, you’re never sort of hidden, you always feel exposed in that landscape. But it makes it very beautiful as well.”

Life took a sharp turn for the better when Kent moved to her second host family, where she was welcomed into the warmth of a home with four children under 10. “To this day they still call me their daughter and I go back to see them every couple of years,” Kent says.

She also began to learn the language. Her book retains many Icelandic terms and place names – spiky, difficult words, but essential to the novel’s sense of place. A pronunciation guide at the beginning is helpful until the momentum of Agnes’s story sweeps you up and carries you off, past caring. “If you neglect the language or ignore it, it’s not anchored to a particular place … it could be anywhere,” she says. “This is such an Icelandic story and I really wanted to evoke an Icelandic setting.”

She succeeds remarkably well. The story of Agnes awaiting her fate in the stark northern landscape is one that readers won’t quickly forget.

Burial Rites (Picador Australia, $32.99) is published on May 1.