Helen Garner: ‘Trigger warnings make me want to die of boredom’
The author on the censoriousness of modern publishing, the brilliance of Gisèle Pelicot and her new book on the trial of mushroom murderer Erin Patterson.
Australian writer Helen Garner has received the $100,000 Baillie Prize for nonfiction, one of the UK’s top literary awards. Darren James / Orion Books via AP
It’s one thing to write candidly in your diary about the inner torments of being a writer, or how you went “berserk” when you discovered your husband was having an affair. It’s quite another to publish it all.
That’s what the 83-year-old author Helen Garner has been doing for years, culminating in March with the UK release of How to End a Story, an 800-page collection of her journal entries from 1978 to 1998. So compelling and pacey is the book, probably the best literary diary since Virginia Woolf’s, that on Tuesday it won the £50,000 ($100,000) Baillie Gifford Prize, Britain’s foremost non-fiction award.
