Are you fascinated by how stories are created? Where does a writer, filmmaker, or songwriter get that first spark, the idea that grabs them and insists tell this story.

It’s something I have always been interested in. I love learning about how a movie goes from storyboard to opening night, or how a lick of a guitar riff becomes a hit song.

I pored over Kate Grenville’s In Search of the Secret River in which she details the research and other preparation that went into the writing of her best-selling historical novel The Secret River. Likewise her more recent Unsettled, a memoir of coming to terms with uncomfortable truths in our personal, family and national history, also relevant to that ground-breaking earlier work.

So I was delighted to pick up a copy of Hannah Kent’s latest work, Always Home, Always Homesick.

In a way, it’s the story of how she wrote her best-known story to date, Burial Rites, first published in 2013. This historical novel was based on the tragic real-life character of Agnes Magnusdottir who was tried for her role in the brutal murder of two men on a remote farm in Iceland in the 1800s. Agnes was found guilty and was the last woman to be executed in Iceland.

Hannah learned of Agnes and her fate while she was a young student in Iceland on a year’s Rotary Exchange program. If the novel’s subject matter had not already interested me, the circumstances of its beginnings certainly did, because decades before Hannah set off on her exchange adventure, I had done likewise – to the USA, not Iceland – but like Hannah, leaving family and home behind for a year to live with several different families in the town to which I was sent.

I was intrigued that this young woman was so captivated by a story from her host country that after her return to Australia, Agnes’s fate stayed in her mind. Hannah returned to Iceland several times, including to conduct research in Icelandic archives and museums but also in the places Agnes lived, worked and eventually died. All of these experiences went into the book that quickly became a global best-seller and launched the author’s literary career.

Always Home, Always Homesick is, at its core, a ‘love letter’ to the country that changed her life. She writes about the moment she decided to apply for the Rotary exchange program and why, that This is the thing that will lead me further into life, that will allow me to breathe lung-deep of it. (ebook p54)

Then the excitement and trepidation of preparing for her year away, trying to learn about Iceland and its language at a time when there was not the ready access to such information as we now have. Donning the rather ghastly Rotary exchange student uniform (the green blazer with its Australiana pins obviously not changed much since my time in the late 1970s…) and hoping that the Rotary contact meeting her at the airport is on time and will recognise her as the exchange student. Getting on that plane takes courage and hope.

I remember all those feelings!

Then the confusion of arriving in a foreign land where customs and behaviours can be so different. And for Hannah, trying to quickly pick up an entirely new language from scratch. Starting school almost immediately on arrival – a daunting proposition. Loneliness and feeling isolated to start with, until breaking through with a warm, friendly family who welcome her as one of their own. Again, there were some echoes of my own time on exchange here.

She experiences the full gamut of Iceland’s seasonal changes and its stark, dramatic beauty, and begins to channel her feelings about it into writing:

I am falling in love with Iceland, and I need to articulate the hold it has over me. My writing, once a balm for solitude and lonliness, takes on a euphoric urgency. Writing now feels like prayer.

Always Home, Always Homesick ebook p192

When her exchange year is over and she returns to Australia, she studies creative writing and works seriously on her craft. But Agnes’s story is always in her mind so it is inevitable that when she returns to the embrace of her new-found family and friends, the research becomes another focus for her time there.

This was also of great interest to me: having trailed around historic sites in Australia and England in search of places of significance in stories I wanted to tell, I loved reading about this aspect of her writing. The hours spent in Icelandic archives, painstakingly examining census documents for a glimpse of Agnes or her family. Translating old documents into English. Taking hundreds of photos in museums. Reading, listening and watching archival and modern-day accounts of Agnes’s life, crime, trial and execution.

All the things that go into the story of a story.

Always Home, Always Homesick was published by Picador in 2025.