In 2013 I resigned from a long career in computing, packed my family belongings into a shipping container, rented my Australian house for 18 months and went to Italy for a week long ‘Unlock your Creativity’ course in Florence. I was hoping to draw a line under 30 years of busy-family-life writer’s block.
I spent that summer in Milos, autumn in England and returned to Australia for a year at Dangar Island where I finished the first draft of Thalassa.
Following the publication of Thalassa in 2017, I spent 5 years researching and writing the true story of my maternal great grandparents’ immigration from Scotland to Australia. Clouds Will Break was published in December 2022.
I am now working on the sequel to Clouds Will Break. Garments of the Soul is my maternal grandparents’ story, set in Melbourne in the first half of the 20th century; a period savaged by two world wars, the depression, the Spanish Flu, and polio.
I live on the Hawkesbury River near Sydney with my Maltese Shih Tzu, and am again distracted from writing by my two daughters and three grandchildren.
Brenda Hall 