One of Australia’s best-known writers, Kate Grenville has published eight novels, a collection of short stories, and four books about the writing process. Her compelling novel The Secret River examines the darker regions of Kate’s own family history and Australia’s settler past. The title won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Grenville’s recently released Sarah Thornhill, the third part of The Secret River trilogy, brings Kate’s characters across to colonial New Zealand. Reviews praise her novels as vivid and vital acts of ‘testimony, memory and mourning’, and extraordinary in their ‘transformation of historical details into story, language into poetry’. Kate was joined in conversation by Paula Morris.