Cirrus@Austlit

'Just over two years ago, I was - to put it plainly - shitting myself. It was January 2011, and the novel I needed to write, the historical novel that was to be the creative component of my PhD in Creative Writing at Flinders University, could no longer be avoided. While, in the first few years of my degree, I had managed to stave off my supervisors' queries with promises that I was performing 'very crucial' research into nineteenth-century Iceland, the time had come for me to finally produce my first attempt at a novel. My supervisors, their smiles slipping, were asking to see the goods. My scholarship - my only income - was rapidly drawing to a rude halt. The problem was, I had no idea how to write a book, and that terrified me...' (Publication abstract)