The book that changed me: Hannah Kent, Sarah Wilson, Hilde Hinton and more

For many of us, reading is a leisurely pursuit, a way to relax, challenge our views of the world and see things from a different perspective. But what if writing is your job?

From books on philosophy, to those that inspire us to connect with the environment, authors find inspiration from many places, often far beyond the genre in which they choose to write.

Here, six female writers share the book that shaped how they approach their own work – and lives.

Hannah Kent

“Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants is a 2013 non-fiction book by Potawatomi Professor Robin Wall Kimmerer. She is a botanist and the book is an incredible collection of essays that explores the interconnectedness of humans and our natural world – in both a language that comprises the scientific, the spiritual and the cultural.

I found it so transformative because it made me realise that I was hungry for this kind of language. She expressed both spiritual truths and scientific truths, often in the same paragraph. Hers was a language of inclusion rather than exclusion, and articulated in an extraordinary way.

Hannah Kent has returned to Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants many times.Credit: Jarred Walker

I am someone who has always loved the outdoors; this book made me regard it in a new light and feel a greater intimacy with it. As a writer, it helped me examine the ways I explore how the natural environments of my characters shape who they are.

The book was a gift from my wife after COVID, and was exactly what I needed to read when I was looking for certainty and hope. I have returned to this book time and again; I am drawn to its rich wisdom whenever I feel I need to be set back on track.”

Hannah Kent is the author of Always Home, Always Homesick (Picador Australia).

Holly Wainwright

“I read Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh when I was eight years old. It changed my life. It’s about a nosy little girl who lives in New York City – a place I had never been; I grew up in Manchester, England. She lived in an apartment with a doorman and had a nanny. Her parents went to glamorous events, but what I related to was that she was a writer and obsessed with nosing about in other people’s lives. I read it 10 times.

Harriet spies on her neighbours, writes about them in her notebook and observes her friends. They find out and are furious about it. It speaks about friend groups; one of the lessons it taught me was the difference between what you should say out loud and what you shouldn’t.

Holly Wainwright read Harriet the Spy as an eight-year-old.

I was a magazine journalist for years and then an online one. In those early years of online writing, you were rewarded for being raw and brutal, but it also made me think about Harriet. The book made me realise I wasn’t the only kid who kept notebooks; I remember writing in my own journal, and the way I pictured the world was the way I write about it. Harriet’s nanny encouraged her to be adventurous, and I wanted that for myself, too.”

Holly Wainwright is the author of He Would Never (Pan Macmillan Australia).

Sarah Wilson

“Viktor Frankl had been a prisoner in Auschwitz and afterwards wrote Man’s Search for Meaning in nine days. I found it at a bus station in Malaga, Spain, before I went on a hike in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Sarah Wilson found her most influential book at a bus station in Spain.

I was hiking with a library bag, cucumber, orange, water and this book. I would sit under a tree each day in the 40-degree heat to read it. The book had a profound effect on me in my late 30s. It instilled in me a sense that life is meant to be hard, and that’s when we rise to become our best selves.

Frankl was a psychologist who spent four years in the camps, where he observed which characteristics enabled some men to survive while others died. He watched the big, tough men perish; those who survived had a deeper purpose, something bigger than themselves – it was generally God or family.

I have been on a spiritual search for years and have endured tough times, and that notion of living for something bigger than yourself really struck me. The pendulum has swung to individualism and selfishness again; people are made to believe it’s what we need to survive.”

Sarah Wilson is the author of This One Wild and Precious Life (Harper Collins).

Hilde Hinton

“The Deptford Trilogy by Canadian author Robertson Davies is a very obscure series I discovered as a 22-year-old with a new baby. I was a wayward youth, going from one dead-end job to another. I arrived in Perth from Melbourne with a suitcase, found a place to live and walked past a second-hand bookshop. The bookseller literally threw one of Davies’ books at me. I threw it back. Then he threw it again. I thought bugger it, I’ll keep it.

The book shaped the rest of my life because after I read it, I told my dad we should start a second-hand bookshop. I did that for 20 years. I’d read six books a week then – that background inspired me to write. I was 50 when my first book came out; it was autobiographical. I am now on book four and still have imposter syndrome.

The Deptford Trilogy helped Hilde Hinton through a tough time in her life.

There were periods when I felt isolated in Perth. I was regrouping, resetting and didn’t have many friends there. Dad’s way of bringing us up was very character building. It gave us the ability to think you can do anything. He told me to move away [from Melbourne] because my life wasn’t going anywhere. It was a healing year for me, too. I never dealt with Mum’s death [she died by suicide when Hinton was 12], and it was a good idea to reset. I came back to Melbourne with the love of the world and some direction again.”

Hilde Hinton is the author of The Opposite of Lonely (Hachette Australia).

Geraldine Brooks

“I discovered Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard when I was in my early 20s. It’s a beautiful meditation by a woman who was in her early 20s and goes off to live in a rural place in the hills of Virginia, USA. She notices things for a year – the animals, the seasons, the way the light hits the mountains, and writes about it with grace and meaning.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek helped Geraldine Brooks make sense of man’s relationship to nature.

It’s a book someone gave to my mother, and I was visiting her once and took it off the shelf. At the time I was working as a young journalist on The Sydney Morning Herald and had the chance to write about environmental issues. I would write about wilderness campaigners, go bushwalking, and do more demanding trips to write about proposed developments. I got to go camping in the snow and went rafting on Tasmania’s Franklin River.

The book gave me a sense of being out in nature and taught me what that means to humans. The book helped me to notice things on a deeper level. I am not a religious person, but there is something ‘religious adjacent’ that comes with being in nature.”

Geraldine Brooks is the author of Memorial Days (Hachette Australia).

Victoria Elizabeth Schwab

“Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein infected my mind with rhythm and cadence. I am someone who started writing poetry before I wrote my first novel many years later. I wanted to see if I could infect prose with poetic metre and use that as a way to make my voice stand out on the page.

Where the Sidewalk Ends gave Victoria Elizabth Schwab her love of candence and poetry.Credit: Jenna Maurice

I am an only child and my parents read me poems every night before bed. Shel Silverstein was the first voice in my head. The combination of dark material conveyed with a childlike metre intrigued me. By the time I was nine, I would think in metre and rhyming couplets. I would have to smooth out my writing so it sounded normal to everyone else.

To this day, when I am writing, I am very aware of the rise and fall of a sentence and syllabic rhythm of a sentence. Each one of my novels has a central sentence that exists for me, and me alone. For my upcoming work, there is a poem at the beginning. The sentence is, ‘Bury my bones in the midnight soil.’

Growing up with poetry, I always think about the musicality of a sentence, and I owe that to Shel. His work also had a profound depth; it wasn’t just playful, it was also dark. The sinister appeal has shown up in all my books. I read all his poetry collections until they almost turned to dust.”

Victoria Elizabeth Schwab is the author of Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil (Pan Macmillan Australia).

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