‘I could feel the cold’: the dreams that told Hannah Kent what to write

In 2020, Hannah Kent began regularly dreaming of Iceland in a way that was so vivid she could feel the cold wind whipping off the wild northern sea. It wasn’t the first time the author had experienced dreams that felt portentous, but with Australia in a COVID lockdown and a new baby also interrupting her sleep, she was left a little shaken.

“There was often a sense of something coming or something that I needed to pay attention to, like the dream was asking something of me,” she says. “I could feel the cold and I could feel the landscape, and it was in this heightened detail.”

She even spoke Icelandic in the dreams: “It was so peculiar because, in my waking hours, I forget so much … but in my dreams I would be more fluent.”

Kent has considered Iceland her second home since she spent a year there as a teenage exchange student in 2003. It provided the setting and idea for her bestselling debut novel Burial Rites, published 10 years later, and she revisits it in her new book, Always Home, Always Homesick.

Hannah Kent as an exchange student in Iceland.Credit: Courtesy Hannah Kent

On a sunny autumn morning at a cafe in the leafy Adelaide Hills, near where she grew up and the home she now shares with wife Heidi and their two young children, she reflects that her lockdown dreams were symptomatic of a “destabilising homesickness” for Iceland. “Just knowing that I was stuck made me realise how much it meant to me, and even the possibility of Iceland was important to me… not necessarily being there, but just knowing that I could go.”

Kent completed her third novel, Devotion, during the pandemic, but the spark had been ignited for Always Home, Always Homesick, a memoir of her time living in Iceland that also illuminates pivotal points in her journey to becoming an author.

She recounts how, aged about six and inspired by her love of books, she told her parents she wanted to be a writer. They were encouraging, but suggested that writers often had other jobs as well. Perhaps she could be a writer “and something else”.

In year 12, she was accepted for the local Rotary Club’s student exchange program. Young Hannah put Iceland on her list of preferred countries for one reason: snow. “I’d never seen it before,” she explains with a laugh. “It always seemed to me such a magical thing. I think like a lot of kids born in the mid- to late ’80s, we were fed a pretty steady diet of European literature, and there’s a lot of snow.”

She ended up in a tiny, remote Icelandic town called Saudarkrokur, which she describes in Always Home, Always Homesick as “wild with mountains and sky and sea”.

“When I arrived it grew light at around 11 in this very blue, Nordic noir sort of way, and then it would be dark again by three,” she says. “So you’d have about four hours of daylight, but you wouldn’t see the sun because it was hidden behind the mountains … I liked the novelty of that, and I liked the novelty of the wind and the snow and the weather.”

Kent has drawn on her talent for lyrical language and a box full of diaries, notebooks and correspondence to create evocative descriptions of Iceland. She immerses readers in the culture – where traditional foods range from fermented shark to boiled potatoes finished in caramel – and daily life with different host families and friends.

Despite being slightly nervous travelling to Iceland and experiencing some challenges in her first months, Kent wholeheartedly embraced the experience.

“In many ways it was a slightly strange decision for me [to apply for the exchange] because I am generally quite a careful, quiet person, but I think that it felt exciting and it felt that even if I went and had a terrible time, it would still be an adventure and I would see more of the world.

“I was very concerned about getting to know myself in a quite naïve, sweet way.”

Hannah Kent at her childhood home underneath the oak tree where she says her love of writing took shape.Credit: Ben Searcy Photography

As she fell in love with Iceland, she became inspired by the country’s strong literary culture. “I remember going visiting with people, and you’re in the middle of nowhere, in a tiny little old farmhouse, and the place is just heaving with books – and people are reading them, too.

“I realised that it was possible to actually be quite serious about writing… without feeling like you had to cringe or apologise for having this kind of artistic ambition.”

Hannah Kent became fascinated with the story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir.Credit: Courtesy Hannah Kent

On a road trip during her exchange, Kent saw the site where a young woman, Agnes Magnúsdóttir, had been executed for murder alongside her co-accused in 1830. Iceland is full of stories and sagas, but Agnes got a hold on Hannah.

She was deeply curious about her, and muses that it may have been because they were both outsiders in a small Icelandic community.

“Which is kind of laughable, too, right? You know, a homesick exchange student looks to a condemned woman and thinks, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re just like me’. But I think maybe there was something there.”

Hannah Kent returned to Iceland in 2010 during research for her debut novel, Burial Rites.Credit: Courtesy Hannah Kent

Much later, while doing her honours in creative writing back in Adelaide, she decided to write a novel based on Agnes’ life, beginning an exhaustive research process that included further trips to Iceland. Although she was writing a work of fiction, she was determined to look beyond the official history to get to the truth – and heart – of the story.

The first draft of Burial Rites – a multi-award-winning book translated into more than 30 languages – was written while she was living in a share-house in Melbourne.

Three years after Burial Rites came Kent’s second historical novel, The Good People, which is inspired by Irish folklore. Devotion, published in 2021 and set between 19th-century Prussia and South Australia, ventures into magical realism to tell the story of the unbreakable bond between two women.

TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO HANNAH KENT

1. Worst habit? Biting my nails. Drinking too much coffee.
2. Greatest fear? Something happening to my children. Environmental catastrophe.
3. The line that stayed with you?  “There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places.” From Wendell Berry’s How to Be a Poet.
4. Biggest regret? I don’t have many, but I’ve occasionally worried about what others think. I regret wasting energy on that.
5. Favourite book? Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
6. The artwork/song you wish was yours? Can I choose an album? Tea for the Tillerman by Yusuf / Cat Stevens.
7. If you could time travel, where would you choose to go? I already time travel – I read. I go everywhere.

Kent says it is only relatively recently that she realised how Iceland not only solidified her decision to be a writer, but also influenced the types of stories in which she is interested. “I really love the way in which a lot of these slightly more mythical, disturbing, inexplicable stories in Iceland are presented to you as fact. It’s just incorporated into the greater mysteries of life.”

She has described Devotion as her love letter to Heidi, whom she met in Melbourne in 2016 after being encouraged by friends to try online dating. “Heidi was the first person I agreed to meet up with, and then I just deleted the app,” she says of their instant connection. “It really freaked me out. I was just like, ‘Oh, it’s you’ – like I recognised her.”

Heidi proposed on the day Australians voted “Yes” to marriage equality. Hannah’s much-loved Icelandic host parents Pétur and Regína travelled to Australia for their wedding, bringing as a gift a cushion embroidered with the spines of books from the Icelandic literary canon.
“I thought that was a lovely thing for them to do,” Kent says. “It’s an unusual gift, but it was very much in keeping with how they’ve always understood me.”

Hannah and Heidi moved to Peramangk Country in the Adelaide Hills to raise their two children, Anouk, seven, and Rory, five.

Both kids share Kent’s obsession with snow, and she hopes that when they are older, the family might spend some time living in Iceland. Anouk and Rory also love books. “They’ve been read to every single night. We have a thing called family book, where we all pile into our bed and I will read to them because I do all the voices.”

The film rights have been sold to all three of Kent’s novels, and after writing the screenplay for the 2023 horror movie Run Rabbit Run, starring Sarah Snook, she is now working on the screen adaptations of The Good People and Devotion. She’s also focused on her next book, which will be another novel.

When I comment that she didn’t end up needing a second career option – to be “a writer and something else” – Kent laughs. “I still think of ‘ands’. For many years, I was going to be a pastry chef – I love cooking,” she says, adding that at various points she also considered teaching and medicine, and last year worked for a while in the bookshop just up the street from where we’re sitting.

“I cast my net super-wide,” she says. “I’ve always been slightly neurotic about how long I’m going to be able to write, so it’s good to have back-up plans.”

Always Home, Always Homesick (Pan Macmillan Australia) will be available from April 29. Hannah Kent will appear as a guest at Melbourne Writers Festival (May 8-11). The Age is a festival partner.