Her solution to this dilemma was unexpected.
Kent's first screenplay - Run Rabbit Run - is set to be filmed next year, starring Elisabeth Moss. So I'm going to have to accord everything with the perspective of a white settler … I didn't want to continually perpetuate those old ideologies." I'm not Aboriginal myself, that's not my place to take up. "I'm never going to write from an Aboriginal perspective. "I don't think I felt ready for it - but I didn't want to paint myself into a corner: I didn't want to end up being the person who just picks a murderous woman from history and subverts the narrative," she explains.īut she knew writing about Australian colonial history would be difficult. Kent approached writing about Australian history with caution.
Note: This article contains spoilers for the second half of the novel. "All these sorts of things came together and started to seed a sense of a place, of a new landscape that I could write about." Writing about Australia Kent herself is related to Old Lutheran families that came to South Australia after this first wave of migration. They end up settling in Heiligendorf, a fictionalised version of Hahndorf, where these days tourists visit cuckoo clock shops and restaurants selling sauerkraut and ham hock.įollow Instagram, where life and culture collide.
The Adelaide Hills is also where Hanne, Thea and their community relocate to, seeking a new life free of religious persecution. Kent grew up in the Adelaide Hills, where she still lives, with her wife and two young children. "The more I research, the more I realise what's not there and that's what continues to motivate me." I had discovered through the process of the previous two novels that so much of my writing could be fed by the research process. "In writing Devotion, I knew I wasn't going to suddenly jump to a contemporary novel I didn't feel ready to. "It's certainly not intentional, but I probably do end up researching this time or writing about this time, because I often discover the seeds for future stories while I'm researching another book," she explains. Kent appears to have carved out a narrow historical niche all her novels take place in the 1820s and 1830s. In 2011, Kent won the inaugural Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Award for Burial Rites. The novel was a commercial and critical hit, and is reportedly being adapted for screen by Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name), with Jennifer Lawrence to star.
Instead, inspired by the story of Agnes Magnusdottir, she wrote Burial Rites. Kent never set out to become a historical fiction writer when she studied creative writing at university, she intended to write plays. With Kent's exquisite prose, Devotion follows Hanne and Thea across oceans and spiritual planes, taking their love story from Europe to Australia and playing thrillingly with history and fiction.
"I really just wanted to write about two girls falling in love." "I have lived my entire life hungry for narratives that represent something akin to what I have experienced in my own life … something that I would have appreciated when I was younger, and something that my wife would like. "In the end, I just threw all caution to the wind and said: 'No, I want to write a love story that I can relate to and that pleases me - and if some people dislike that, well at least I'll enjoy reading it.' "I was aware of having an audience initially, and what sort of story people might want to read about," she recalls. But when the same-sex marriage vote passed and her partner Heidi proposed, she realised she wanted to tell a different story. Kent had first set out to write a novel about female friendship. She also can't make a friend - until Thea and her family move to Kay. The novel's heroine, Hanne, is on the cusp of womanhood and struggling to meet the domestic expectations placed on her by her family and community. Devotion begins in 1836, with a community of Old Lutherans who have settled temporarily in the Prussian town of Kay.