Kent Hannah: Always Home, Always Homesick

She speaks in images. I have chosen to give her a tongue of landscape. She speaks in stones and in dirt. In ashes and in snow.

When she was seventeen years old, Hannah Kent travelled to Iceland from Australia. She'd never seen snow before, didn't speak a word of Icelandic. All she knew was that she wanted to have an experience - to soak up something of the world. Soon she found herself isolated in a remote part of Iceland in a dark winter. It was a gruelling experience, but she quickly fell in love with the country: with its brutally beautiful landscapes and with its people. On returning home, Hannah had found a story, and so she began to write.

Always Home, Always Homesick is a memoir about love and homesickness, about motherhood and memory, and about what it is to write. After leaving Iceland, Hannah wrote a novel that became a phenomenon, that made her an honorary Icelander and which contributed to global fascination with Iceland. Now, as a mother and a wife, she looks back to that extraordinary year in Iceland, and to all the times she returned, and to the woman at the heart of the story that would inspire her debut novel.