It’s been more than 20 years since then 17-year-old Australian exchange student Hannah Kent arrived at Keflavik Airport in the middle of an Icelandic winter.
Hours passed as she waited with her giant suitcase, ready to be collected, but no one came.
Instead she caught the last bus to Reykjavik, where a man in a dressing gown was waiting for her at the depot.
That Rotarian exchange program was the start of a long fascination with the Nordic island country, one she would return to years later to write an international best selling novel, Burial Rites.
Hannah, now 40, is well embedded in the Australian literary scene.
She’s also a wife and mother to two young children, settling with her family in the Adelaide Hills where she grew up. The memories of that year-long exchange are included in her latest creative work, Always Home, Always Homesick, a memoir of her experiences of living in Iceland and how it has shaped the person she is today.
The book details her life’s events over the last two decades, including the year in the small northern fishing village of Sauðárkrókur, researching and writing Burial Rites and delivering the opening night address to the 2023 Reykjavik International Literary Festival.
The debut novel Burial Rites was published in 2013, inspired by the true story of young woman Agnes Magnusdottir, the last woman to be executed in Iceland in 1830.
It went on to become an international bestseller, translated into more than 30 languages and is currently being adapted for film.
“I’m very grateful for the ways in which my representation of her (Agnes) and Burial Rites enabled my career in writing,” Hannah says.
“I have so much to thank that first novel and the people who supported it.
“That gratitude extends to her, even though she’s a real person and mine is a character, but I think of her probably most often in the sense of someone who, for many years, I thought of every single day and then as someone who I have grieved for.
“I think we always carry the people that we have mourned and I think it would be true to say that I mourned her, and so I still carry her in that same way … my thoughts tend to her quite frequently.”
After Burial Rites came two more novels, The Good People, translated into 10 languages, nominated for numerous awards and also being adapted for film, and Devotion, published in 2021 and winning Booktopia’s Favourite Australian Book as well as being shortlisted for multiple industry awards.
The latest work is Hannah’s first foray into memoir writing, a task she admits she mistakenly thought would be “a walk in the park”.
“It takes an extraordinary amount of vulnerability,” she says.
“I went in with quite a lot of naivety as to what was required, but I feel I’m a stronger writer for having done it.”
The idea for Always Home, Always Homesick was sprouted during the Covid-19 pandemic when her mother dropped off a giant box of ‘stuff’ from her childhood and teenage years.
Among the bits and pieces were journals and copies of emails Hannah had sent home during her exchange trip to Iceland.
Re-reading the letters during a time when global travel was put on hold, Hannah says she felt homesick for the country that changed her life’s trajectory, and so the memoir process began.
“I felt a deep sense of wanting to express how thankful I am for the many ways in which Iceland not only shaped my writing both in subject matter, but also in the types of things I’m interested in as a writer,” she says.
“Also, how it shaped me as a person.
“I think 17 is a very formative year in anyone’s life.
“These are the years when you are just on the cusp of being an adult and really entering into a time of independence.
“For many people it’s the first time in their lives being moved out of home, so I do feel a wide-ranging and very deeply felt gratitude to the country and my deciding to write about it is not so much the sense that I owe it to Iceland, but that I need some place to put this gratitude.”
Hannah moved back to Adelaide from Melbourne with her wife, Heidi, and the couple is raising their two young children in the Adelaide Hills, appreciating the area’s strong sense of community and the kids’ ability to easily connect with nature.
On the weekends you’ll find them sipping hot chocolates at Red Cacao in Stirling, browsing books at Matilda Bookshop or munching on sushi at Yuki in the Hills at Aldgate.
Other favourites include playing among the oak trees near Aldgate Oval and spending hours at the Bridgewater playground and Cox Creek.
“The Hills has always been home to me,” Hannah says.
“It’s always been a place I’ve gone to for solace and to rest and reflect.
“I have so many friends who I went to high school with who moved overseas and interstate and now I just keep bumping into everyone.
“It’s a great place to live and to raise children because of the community, because of the beauty and your proximity to nature.”
Raising children has changed Hannah’s creative practice, something she reflects on in the opening few pages of Always Home, Always Homesick.
She explains how the realities of early motherhood has shifted her priorities and served fast lessons on how she no longer has the luxury of time or set routine in terms of her writing.
“(Before children) I was very disciplined and I think it served me well at the time,” she says.
“I would try to get to the computer at the same time every day and wouldn’t leave until I’d written a certain amount.
“I really held myself to that kind of schedule.
“But anyone with kids knows that all schedules and plans get thrown out the window.
“That’s the only regular thing about it, the interruption.
“So I think I’ve sort of become aware that, yes, discipline is great and I love a schedule and routine, but sometimes it’s not always practical.
“I was privileged to be able to have that discipline for so many years of my writing career and so I have a new appreciation of all the other people out there who have other claims on their time.
“I think my respect for other writers has grown and my understanding of what is needed to sit down and write a book has changed, too.”
