Blanche d'Alpuget on a life in books after Bob Hawke

The author of Winter in Jerusalem, and widow of Bob Hawke, on spiritual awakenings, digesting the Bible and her latest installment in the Birth of the Plantagenets series.

Author Blanche d'Alpuget in her Northbridge home. "You have to keep wrestling with the angel, your spiritual nature, until it reveals the higher truths." Wolter Peeters

Nicole Abadee

Jul 17, 2019 – 12.00am

Email LinkedIn Twitter Facebook

Subscribe to gift this article

Gift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe.

Subscribe now

Already a subscriber?

What are you reading at the moment? Are books providing some comfort?

Historical fiction. I’m so raw, emotionally, that I can’t read contemporary fiction because so much of it is dystopian and I can’t cope with dystopian ideas right now. I am reading The Cadfael Chronicles by Ellis Peters, a series set in the 12th century about a monk who solves mysteries. They are soothing – like comfort food.
I am also reading Tales of the Dervishes by Idries Shah, an anthology of Sufi teaching stories, and Dark Night of the Soul by 16th-century Spanish poet and mystic St John of the Cross, about spiritual awakening.