Kathryn Lomer

What’s your latest book? The Spare Room

What’s it about? It’s about nineteen-year-old Akira, who comes from Japan to study English in Hobart.  He lives with a homestay family, the Moffats, and learns a lot more than a second language.

What’s the best thing about being a writer? You become interested in everything, or everything becomes interesting – I’m not sure which.  And you can create something from all those otherwise useless odds and ends you accumulate in life - memories, experiences, overheard conversations, dreams, anecdotes; it’s a bit like making a quilt from leftover scraps of material.

What’s the biggest frustration? Overlooking a good idea for a story, or not writing down an idea or a line of poetry before I forget it.

How long have you been writing and how did it all start? I started writing in 1994, when I was living in a small apartment in the Dolomite Mountains in Italy.  I ran out of books to read and started to write my own short stories.  I’d known for some time I wanted to write, and had with me some notes on story ideas and some scraps of writing.  I’d read a collection of stories by Australian author, Carmel Bird, and a few were set in the northwest of Tasmania, where I grew up.  Somehow those stories made me feel free to write about what I knew.  I wrote those stories with an HB pencil and a spiral-bound notebook, which I rapidly filled up.

What are you reading?
Fiction: The Master Butchers Singing Club by American author, Louise Erdrich
Non-fiction: At The Water’s Edge – Fish with Fingers, Whales with Legs by Carl Zimmer
Poetry: War is not the Season for Figs by Lidija Cvetkovic

How did you spend your teenage years?
I had a beautiful palomino horse which I rode all over our farm.  I also loved working on the farm, and sometimes friends came to help.  Then I left high school at 15 after Grade 10 and started work in a bank.  I got a second job and saved for a car and to go overseas.

What was your favourite book as a teenager? I don’t remember a particular favourite.  We didn’t have many books in our house but we went to the library every week to borrow books.  I’d read all the books I’d borrowed, then all the books my mother had borrowed.  We did have four illustrated encyclopedias which I also loved poring over.

Your desert island book? A Collins English dictionary.  I love discovering new words and the etymology of words.

Desert island disc? Something in Spanish – possibly by Mercedes Sosa – so that I could try to puzzle out the meaning of the lyrics.

Who are your heroes? Xanana Gusmao, Michael Ondaatje, Paul Cox, Joni Mitchell, Frida Kahlo, Joy Hester, Charmian Clift, Vaclav Havel, Bob Brown

What might people be surprised to know about you?I never iron.