US writer Helen DeWitt has spoken out after being chosen as one of the original eight recipients of this year’s Windham-Campbell writing prizes, worth $175,000 (£130,000) each, but ultimately having to turn down the award because she was unable to participate in the promotional activities that the prize requires.

In a blog and a series of posts on X, the cult author of books including The Last Samurai said that she had been told she had won the award in February, but that receiving the money was “contingent on extensive promotion”, including participating in a festival, a podcast and a six- to eight-hour filming session for a promotional video.

At the time, DeWitt was “close to breakdown” after a series of professional and personal difficulties, she explained. “If you’re trying not to crack up, there are some things you can’t do; it’s hard to get people to accept that,” she wrote in a blog posted the day the winners of this year’s awards were announced.

Learning of the publicity requirements, she wrote that it was “impossible to imagine Pynchon or Cormac McCarthy, in early career, contemplating this with anything but horror”. She added: “If I had eight months clear before the festival I might be able to go to that, but how can I drop everything now, when I had finally cleared time to write after five very bad years?”

DeWitt’s blogpost recounted a lengthy exchange with prize director Michael Kelleher, during which he appears to agree to make some accommodations, such as relaxing the requirement to speak on a podcast. However, in response to DeWitt’s suggestion that other writers and her husband be filmed for the video in her place, she was told that her personal participation was essential.

Towards the end of the email exchange, DeWitt tells Kelleher she must “regretfully decline to accept the prize on the specified terms”.

The Windham-Campbell prizes were launched in 2013, funded by a bequest from the writer Donald Windham. Recipients, which this year include the British novelist Gwendoline Riley, are nominated confidentially.

“If the superstructure of the prize excludes people who are not able to do all the extra things you want, that hardly seems in the spirit of what was intended by its generous founders,” DeWitt wrote in an email to Kelleher, quoted in her blogpost.

“The Windham-Campbell prizes are life-changing awards rooted in the communal, public celebration of writers and their work,” said Kelleher in response to a request for comment from the Guardian. “We deeply appreciate all writers and respect that some individuals may choose not to participate. We celebrate the achievements of our recipients and the power of literature to connect us all.”

Set in the early 1960s, The Daffodil Days tells the story of a couple who move from London to the countryside, have a second child and attempt to settle there, but then, their marriage in tatters, move away again. Instead of describing the couple directly we glimpse them through the eyes of the people around them, from the village doctor, their charlady and various neighbours, to friends, colleagues and visitors, offering the reader vignettes drawn from varying distances and perspectives. Although it is not mentioned in the book’s jacket copy, the couple in question are Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes; eight weeks after the period described in the novel, Plath, having returned to London, would take her own life.

During their time in Devon, from 1961–2, Plath completed The Bell Jar, gave birth to a son, Nicholas, at home, and wrote the poems that would be posthumously published as Ariel; Hughes began his affair with Assia Wevill, which Plath quickly discovered. Given that the couple’s lives provide the source material for an entire cottage industry, you would be forgiven for thinking that there was little left to say about their time in Devon that has not already been said; but by coming at its subject from the viewpoints of others, this virtuoso, deeply researched and utterly convincing debut achieves something quite extraordinary. At points, the experience of reading it feels very close to time travel: Yes, you think, as you watch Plath sitting with her daughter Frieda on her lap in the garden, or having her thumb stitched up by the local GP, or glimpse her getting up to write at 4am: that is just how it must have been.

The injured thumb, of course, inspired her poem Cut, and we see her testing out some of its images and metaphors on Dr Webb (“A flap like a hat, / Dead white. / Then that plush”). Here, too, is the camel-coloured suit she described in a letter to her mother, and which can be seen in photos of her taken in autumn 1962: having found nothing at the local ladies’ boutique, Bain has the shop assistant tell her to try Jaeger in Exeter. Here is the concrete floor that stubbornly wouldn’t dry, and the Bendix washing machine Plath was so pleased with; here is her trip to Broadcasting House to record her essay A Comparison for radio. We meet her friends Clarissa Roche, Al Alvarez, and Marvin and Kathy Kane, and glimpse Plath and Hughes’s famously difficult friendship with Dido and William Merwin – including a retelling of the infamous incident in which a pregnant Plath apparently polished off lunch for four people. In Bain’s hands it’s neither thoughtless, selfish nor “Pantagruelian” (Dido’s word), but a mischievous and deliberate act of revenge.

Structuring a novel so that its story is told through multiple narrators presents significant technical difficulties. Not only must each character have a different voice – something Bain largely achieves – but they must possess their own interiority, too, each drawn clearly enough for the reader to remember who they are when they re-encounter them in a subsequent chapter, and through other eyes. To control what each narrator reveals of the novel’s central thread requires the writer to steer a careful path: make the “plot” (Sylvia and Ted’s collapsing marriage) too important to all the characters and the result will feel stagey and overly managed, but make it too peripheral to their lives and all pace and tension are lost.

But on top of these challenges Bain adds another: she tells the story backwards, beginning in December 1962 with Plath and Hughes’s house, Court Green in North Tawton, being packed up after their separate departures, and ending with the two of them in France in July 1961, looking ahead to their move to Devon. Although the reason for this is perhaps understandable – to roll back the events that led so devastatingly to Plath’s death and see how and where the rot crept in; to close with the two of them happy and optimistic – it significantly impacts the pace of the novel, stripping it of forward propulsion, and layers on difficulties for readers already working hard to discern the shape of events through multiple viewpoints. The book might have proved a little more accessible – especially to readers unversed in Plath’s biography – either told forwards through multiple voices, or backwards via a single, omniscient point of view.

Despite this, The Daffodil Days is an astonishing achievement, its prose supple and intelligent and exact. Bain’s research has clearly been exhaustive – not just concerning Plath and Hughes’s lives but matters such as bellringing, surgery, shop work, the making of honey, sound recording for broadcast – yet her findings are given over to the service of her characters, making each of their worlds believable without the smell of the lamp. The pleasure this kind of writing produces is not quite enough to make the book work without some biographical knowledge of its two central characters, but for those readers unfamiliar with Plath’s last months a little online research is not a great deal to ask.

In a 1993 piece for the New Yorker, quoting the critic George Steiner, the great literary journalist Janet Malcolm wrote, “How the child, ‘plump and golden in America’, became the woman, thin and white in Europe, who wrote poems like Lady Lazarus and Daddy and Edge, remains an enigma of literary history.” This ambitious and insightful novel is a very convincing reply.

There has never been a better time than now for Man, the protagonist of Helen of Nowhere, to be a neo-transcendentalist. As a university professor, the lessons he imparts involve encouraging his students to remove themselves from the politics of the city and “the tools of human construction” to pursue the purity of nature. In doing so, Man muses, they might invoke an “innate ability to engage in simply being” outside arbitrary institutions of knowledge, such as the university.

Man is a good person, or so we hear. He is observant, he listens. And of course, “I [love] women,” he tells us. “I’d worked hard for women my entire life.” But “the fact was that war had been declared against me [by] … a faction of women … They were hysterical … and maybe evil, words I could only bring myself to whisper … for I knew the politics behind their deployment.”

Despite his inducements to kindness, fun and joy, Man is let go from work: his views are no longer compatible with the university’s. Later still, Wife, his spouse and also a professor at the university, leaves him. This might be because they met when he was her teacher and have since outgrown a dynamic where she is subordinate. Or because he speaks casually of hitting her during sex and of hitting her dog. Or simply because she is no longer as beautiful as she was when she was young (not that Man believes telling women they’re beautiful “is good for them”). It’s difficult for him to say – all the same, he is depleted of self and purpose, and it’s clear a return to Nature is needed.

Man views a house in the countryside owned by Helen, about whose bucolic way of living he is taught by Realtor. Although she is now in a care home, Helen used to farm her land self-sufficiently. In doing so, she became attuned to a world of “natural” rather than human-made systems: “[t]here’s contentment outside of all that,” explains Realtor, now the dominant narrative voice. She can see the appeal this kind of ahistoricity or asociality might hold for Man. Still, she says, Man needs to restructure his ego and “come to terms with love” to truly heal. Helen could help. Man, somewhat aroused, agrees. At which point Helen’s spirit enters Realtor to discuss with him where his work and marriage went wrong. Reality dismantles.

Despite how fabular Helen of Nowhere seems in its progression, these kinds of narratorial shifts between Man, Realtor, Helen and ultimately Wife are dexterously, meticulously performed. They help enact a carefully negotiated dialectic: doing v taking, buying v selling, the individual v community, man v nature, dominance v support, masculine v feminine. Beyond its more obvious themes of misogyny and supplanted power, Goodman’s writing also asks worthwhile questions of us all. How much of living is predicated on a reliance on – if not exploitation of – others? To what extent is this bearable? How far does it delegitimise individual pleasure? What should “good” living look like? Where does the knowledge such a pursuit requires come from? Can it be, at once, wholly ethical and personally pleasurable? Each answer, naturally, depends on the privileges afforded a person.

“I think a lot about fires, floods, the end of the world, don’t you?” chirps Realtor during the house tour. In a sense, so does the entire novel – to scale. And Goodman is wonderfully fastidious at avoiding neat moral binaries when analysing such daily catastrophes. “To do the work of being awake,” her novel points out, “one has to live in a dual space.” So naturally, although Man points out (not incorrectly) that empirical and structuralist thinking hamper free, individual thought, those are the very tools with which his female colleagues are liberating themselves. When Man desires community, he is driven to leave a city full of people. But he does so in pursuit of a rural existence that decades of teaching transcendentalism in the city have left him ill-equipped for. Hence, when he imagines a “simple” existence, more in tune with nature, his easiest option is to seek out the country house of a rich woman with a “life like the inside of a golden egg”.

“It was either a shrewd, self-aware intelligence I had achieved that kept me in synch with the darkness of life, or a kind of illogical, misanthropic paranoia … which held me back from happiness,” Man reflects in a semi-hallucinatory state towards the end of the novel. The extent to which his fate is a highly ironic comeuppance or a beautiful kind of salvation very much depends on the reader’s own sensibilities. At a mere 152 pages long, Goodman’s book is a perfect fairytale for our times.

It is coming up to 12 years since the publication of H Is for Hawk, about the historian, writer and naturalist Helen Macdonald’s time spent training a Eurasian goshawk after an intense period of grief. Showered with awards, the book was a runaway hit and sparked a literary trend for shared transformative encounters with animals including cats, dogs, magpies and hares.

This month, H Is for Hawk comes to the big screen in a new adaptation starring Claire Foy. But there is still time to get to know the source material, which tells of the sudden death of the author’s father and how Macdonald, an experienced falconer who had previously trained kestrels and peregrines, took delivery of a temperamental young goshawk named Mabel with the aim of taming her and teaching her to hunt. Macdonald, who is non-binary, is the audiobook’s narrator. Their reading is characterised by introspection, curiosity and flashes of humour as they observe this “spooky, pale-eyed psychopath” who, as well as feeding and flying, likes to play ball with scrunched-up bits of paper.

H Is for Hawk intersperses the author’s adventures with their companion with biographical excerpts on writer TH White whose book, The Goshawk, chronicled his own attempts to train a bird in the 1930s using ancient and cruel methods. Unsurprisingly, Macdonald does a better job and their account of their relationship with the goshawk, which helps to alleviate a grief that feels close to insanity, is deeply affecting. Though the sections on White are diverting, it’s when conjuring the life and character of this extraordinary bird of prey that Macdonald’s prose truly soars.

Further listening

The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can’t Stop Talking About
Mel Robbins, Audible Studios, 10hr 38min
Robbins, a writer, podcaster and motivational speaker, reads her bestselling self-help book advocating confidence, serenity and letting go of the desire to influence other people and their opinions.

A History of England in 25 Poems
Catherine Clarke, Penguin Audio, 12hr 48min
An eclectic series of poems connecting the English to their past, from the jingoist Agincourt Carol (1415) to John of Gaunt’s This England speech in Shakespeare’s Richard II to Adlestrop, Edward Thomas’s wartime paean to the countryside, as viewed from a train.

Helen Garner says the State Library of Victoria has been turned into “party central” and a plan to cut jobs and focus on digital projects will “bring disgrace on the name of our city”, as hundreds of writers express alarm.

Garner has joined more than 220 writers, scholars and researchers in signing an open letter to the library’s board and executive calling for more public accountability, after plans to cut staff and refocus the 171-year-old institution on tourist-oriented digital experiences came to light.

“I’m not a scholar or a researcher but I’m sick about it,” Garner said of the proposed restructure in comments to Guardian Australia.

“In the 70s I wrote my first book [Monkey Grip] there. In those days it was a temple of calm, a demilitarised zone, a refuge from racket, right in the middle of the city. A place where thinking was respected and the conditions for its flourishing were insisted upon. Silence was a custom and a rule,” she said.

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“Then they turned it into a ‘hub’ AKA party central. And now they’re hacking away at the actual librarians? Shame on them. They bring disgrace on the name of our city.”

Signatories to the open letter include Pulitzer prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks, Nobel prize for literature winner JM Coetzee, Nobel laureate Prof Peter Doherty, Booker prize winner Thomas Keneally and dual Stella prize winner Alexis Wright.

Award-winning novelists Charlotte Wood, Trent Dalton, Anna Funder, Kate Grenville and Chloe Hooper, poet Pi O and singer Tim Rogers were also among the signatories.

Guardian Australia understands the letter was delivered to the library’s board chair, Christine Christian, copying in the Minister for Creative Industries, Colin Brooks, on Wednesday evening.

Under the proposed restructure, 39 jobs would be lost and the public-facing workforce of reference librarians would be cut from 25 staff to 10. Many publicly accessible computers would be removed from the premises and critical information technology roles outsourced.

Library staff have accused the institution’s management of undermining the library’s core purposes in favour of flashy tourist-oriented “digital vanity projects”.

The library’s spokesperson said the proposed changes “reflect the Library’s strong commitment to best serving the community now and into the future”.

The open letter echoes recent calls from the library workers’ union, CPSU Victoria, for management to hold a public meeting to explain their proposal.

“We the undersigned writers and researchers esteem the State Library of Victoria, and believe strongly in the importance of its public mission,” the open letter said.

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“We are therefore alarmed at the unilateral cuts to its workforce proposed in October 2025’s ‘Strategic Reorganisation Change Proposal’, in particular the halving of the number of reference librarians. We recommend a public meeting where the board explain their plans and reasoning in detail,” it said.

“We further recommend reforming the library’s governance, following common practice overseas, to incorporate the views of stakeholders including scholars and other public users, whose interests have not been considered in the proposal.”

A separate petition launched by CPSU Victoria on Monday had 2,260 signatures at the time of writing.

A library spokesperson said last week that the library’s executive had “engaged and consulted extensively and in good faith with staff and the CPSU on the proposed changes”.

“State Library Victoria will continue, as we always have, to provide appropriate computer access for the public to assist with research and reference activity,” the spokesperson said.

“The Library is committed to upholding our critical role as an essential service providing free and equal access to knowledge and information.”

A spokesperson for the Victorian government said: “The Library Board of Victoria and leadership are responsible for organisational and staffing matters.”

Australian author Helen Garner has been named the winner of the 2025 Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction for How to End a Story, becoming the first writer to win the prestigious award with a collection of diaries.

The announcement of the £50,000 award was made on Tuesday evening at a ceremony in London. Robbie Millen, chair of judges and the literary editor of the Times, described Garner’s collection as “a remarkable, addictive book,” and said the decision had been unanimous among the six judges. “Garner takes the diary form – mixing the intimate, the intellectual, and the everyday – to new heights.”

The Baillie Gifford is widely regarded as the UK’s most prestigious prize for nonfiction. It is the first major literary award Garner has won in the UK, though she is one of Australia’s most celebrated authors, where her honours include the 2023 Australian Society of Authors medal, the 2019 Australia Council award for lifetime achievement in literature, and the 2006 Melbourne prize for literature. She also won the 2016 Windham-Campbell literature prize administered by Yale University.

Garner, 82, has long been recognised for her sharp-eyed, often uncompromising examinations of domestic life, creativity and morality. Born in Geelong, southern Australia, in 1942, she worked as a high school teacher and journalist before publishing her debut novel, Monkey Grip, in 1977. She has since written fiction, screenplays and nonfiction, including The Children’s Bach and This House of Grief.

How to End a Story collects decades of Garner’s diaries, tracing her life from bohemian Melbourne in the 1970s through an intense love affair in the 1980s to the breakdown of her marriage in the 1990s. The entries are characterised by what the judges called “devastating honesty, steel-sharp wit and an ecstatic attention to the details of everyday life.”

Millen praised the breadth and humanity of the diaries, which run to 832 pages. “It’s a big book,” he said, “but Garner is such good company – funny, original, clever, self-lacerating, always interesting – that we didn’t want the story to end.”

How to End a Story was published to widespread critical acclaim. Rachel Cooke in the Observer called the diaries “the greatest, richest journals by a writer since Virginia Woolf’s.”

Garner’s next work of nonfiction, The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a Triple Murder Trial, co-authored with Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, will be published in the UK on 20 November, based on the infamous Erin Patterson mushroom murder trial.

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Baillie Gifford, the Edinburgh-based investment management firm that has sponsored the prize since 2016, has come under fire in recent years because of its investments in fossil fuels and companies with links to Israel. Last year, boycotts of literary festivals it had sponsored, organised by the campaign group Fossil Free Books, led to the termination of partnerships between Baillie Gifford and nine festivals.

Last year’s winner, Australian author Richard Flanagan, said he would not accept the £50,000 prize money until the fund manager shared a plan to reduce its investments in fossil fuel extraction and increase investments in renewables. At a press conference held to announce the shortlist, prize director Toby Mundy said that Flanagan had had a “candid” conversation with the fund manager, but the ultimate result was that the author did not accept the money and it will instead be donated to a literacy charity.

Alongside Garner’s, the other titles shortlisted this year were The Revolutionists by Jason Burke, The Boundless Deep by Richard Holmes, Captives and Companions by Justin Marozzi, Lone Wolf by Adam Weymouth, and Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson.

The Baillie Gifford was originally founded as the Samuel Johnson prize in 1999. Past winners include Antony Beevor, Jonathan Coe, Serhii Plokhy, Hallie Rubenhold and Katherine Rundell.

This year’s judging panel comprised Millen, historian Pratinav Anil, journalist and broadcaster Inaya Folarin Iman, author and previous Baillie Gifford winner Lucy Hughes-Hallett, the Economist’s deputy culture editor Rachel Lloyd, and author and biographer Peter Parker. The panel selected the winner from more than 350 books published between November 2024 and October 2025.

• To order How to End a Story and browse the shortlist, visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Helen Garner, one of Australia’s most acclaimed authors, is set to publish a new book in November about the Erin Patterson mushroom murder trial.

The book follows the story of Patterson, an Australian woman convicted in July of murdering three of her former in-laws and attempting to murder a fourth by serving them a beef wellington contaminated with death cap mushrooms in 2023. The case, which played out in an Australian court earlier this year, attracted global attention.

The Mushroom Tapes, written with fellow Australian authors Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, will be published by W&N on 20 November. The case has already inspired a television special, a forthcoming ABC drama series and several documentaries.

Prosecutors alleged that Patterson, a mother and self-described true crime enthusiast, invited her estranged husband’s parents, Gail and Don Patterson, and Gail’s sister and brother-in-law, Heather and Ian Wilkinson, to lunch at her Victoria home in July 2023. Within days, three of the guests were dead and the fourth lay in a coma.

Patterson, 51, denied any intent to harm them, claiming she had bought the mushrooms from a grocer and discarded a food dehydrator that later tested positive for deadly toxins only out of panic. After an 11-week trial, a jury found her guilty of three counts of murder and one of attempted murder. She was sentenced in September to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 33 years.

Garner, Hooper and Krasnostein were among the many writers, journalists and documentary teams who attended the trial. According to the publisher, The Mushroom Tapes emerged from their shared experience of “long days immersed in the case’s themes: love, hate, jealousy, revenge, marriage, money, mycology and murder.” The book is described as a “true crime study like no other” and an exploration of both the crime and the public’s obsession with it.

Helen Garner’s work has often intertwined literature and the law. Her debut novel, Monkey Grip (1977), became an instant classic, while her later nonfiction – The First Stone, Joe Cinque’s Consolation and This House of Grief – cemented her reputation as a chronicler of Australia’s most fascinating court cases.

Helen Garner has praised Dua Lipa as a “serious and sensitive” interviewer after the British superstar added Garner’s nonfiction book This House of Grief to her monthly book club.

Garner’s 2014 courtroom drama will be the first Australian inclusion on the popular list, taking the Melbourne author’s work to the singer’s growing global audience.

Lipa said Garner’s book offered a “sharp and forensic analysis of the human condition,” announcing the selection in an Instagram post.

“Although Helen has been writing for almost 50 years, her work is new to me and it’s a thrilling discovery,” Lipa wrote.

“She’s one of the most fascinating writers I have come across in recent years, and I’m sure that, like me, you’ll find yourself diving into her back catalogue.”

Garner will join 23 high-profile authors championed by Lipa after the August publication of the interview, which the author described as “fruitful”.

“I found her an impressive person, serious and sensitive and deeply interested in the difficult questions that the book raises,” Garner said.

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Lipa foreshadowed Garner’s addition ahead of her interview series’ move to streaming on Spotify in June.

“It wouldn’t be my book pile without at least one harrowing story,” Lipa said at the time.

Garner won international acclaim for This House of Grief, a retelling of the trial of Victorian man Robert Farquharson over the murder of his three sons. Farquharson drove his three children into a dam in south-western Victoria in 2005.

The book received special mention in Garner’s 2016 win of the US$150,000 (A$207,633) Windham Campbell literary prize. The author first thought the award was hoax after an email in her junk folder from someone at Yale University who had “good news” and wanted her phone number, she said at the time.

Garner, 82, came to local prominence after the 1977 publication of Monkey Grip but has enjoyed soaring popularity outside Australia in the last decade.

New editions of several of Garner’s books, including This House of Grief, were republished in the UK and US in 2023 and 2024.

Lipa shared a preview of her analysis announcing This House of Grief’s selection on Instagram.

“[Garner’s] not looking for monsters – her interest lies with ordinary people who seem to have been pushed beyond their emotional limits,” Lipa wrote.

“As the trial progresses, I found myself questioning my own reactions, asking myself less, Did he do it? and instead, Is it possible to have empathy for this man, even if he did the worst thing imaginable?”

The 29-year-old singer has attracted more than 450,000 Instagram followers and nearly 100,000 YouTube subscriptions to her Service95 platform, which launched monthly book club picks in 2023.

Authors of each of Lipa’s monthly book picks have sat for extended interviews with the singer, analysing their work and sharing music recommendations. The lone exception is Gabriel García Márquez, author of 1967’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, who died in 2014.

Garner’s is the 24th book to be included and the first by an Australian author, in a list dominated by American books but spanning Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing to Guadalupe Nettel’s Still Born.

Lipa has previously singled out Albanian author Ismail Kadare as a personal inspiration, saying the novelist’s work encouraged her connection with her Kosovan-Albanian heritage in a keynote speech for the Booker prize 2022 ceremony.

“I often wonder if authors realise just how many gifts they give us,” she said.

• This House of Grief by Helen Garner (Orion Publishing Co, £9.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Helen Garner was born in Geelong, Australia, in 1942. She worked as a teacher and as a journalist before her first novel, Monkey Grip, came out in 1977. Garner has since published novels, stories, screenplays and several volumes of her diaries, but she may be best known for her acclaimed nonfiction, which includes The First Stone (1995), about a university college principal who is accused of groping two female students, and This House of Grief (2014), which tells the story of Robert Farquharson, on trial for the murder of his three sons. In 2016, she was awarded the Windham-Campbell literature prize for nonfiction. New editions of three of Garner’s best-known books have just been published in the UK.

For a long time, you were Australia’s great secret. How do you feel about all the new attention you’re getting in the US and the UK?
I guess it would be annoying if I’d had hopes, in all those years, that I’d ever get published outside Australia. But strangely, I never did. I’m aware this sounds like “little me” talk. But in Australia, in my generation and among those who were slightly older like Germaine [Greer], people would get their books published in London first, and then come back to us. You had to get out of here! That was everybody’s aim, because everything important happened somewhere else. I never felt I had to get out, though. Perhaps this was because I wasn’t really an intellectual. I was just somebody with a pathetic third-class degree who taught in high school.

Did that attitude have an effect on your style?
It meant that I didn’t adapt my way of writing for some fantasised international audience. I didn’t have to explain Australian things; to do massive introductory descriptions of Sydney harbour. I wanted to write about stuff I knew and had lived; about the sorts of people I’d grown up with.

Monkey Grip, about a single mother’s relationship with a junkie, was controversial when it came out, wasn’t it?
Yes. This bloke [a critic] said: she has just published her diary. I felt snarky about it, but I ignored it. It was much worse when I was attacked later for The First Stone. If I published something like that now, I’d be cancelled. People were mad with rage. They said I’d set feminism back 20 years [by suggesting the victims of the assault had overreacted]. I was flabbergasted by those attacks, and the way they went on and on. People would give me death stares in the street. I’d be in some cafe, I’d get a bad feeling, and turn round and there would be some young woman staring at me. But I get letters of apology now, which is very gracious. One said: “I was doing women’s studies at university, and I ran around with my little tin whistle of outrage. But now I’m out in the world and I can see things aren’t so black and white.”

What did you make of #MeToo, given that The First Stone anticipates the arguments around it?
At first, I thought: wow, this is great. Some of these guys are going to get what they deserve; they’re going to get their asses kicked. I was happy about that. But as it rolled on, so many people hitched their wagon to it. That terrible, self-righteous tone… The whole idea that some people get cancelled, and that other people are so tremulous and don’t feel safe when they hear an opinion. I find that repulsive and stupid.

Is it true you began writing nonfiction because your then husband was a novelist, and didn’t want you on his patch?
That was my third husband [the Australian writer Murray Bail], though he would never actually have said it. He had a very stern hierarchy of forms, and the novel was right at the top. He’d never written for money; he’d never been a journalist. But all my writing life, I’ve made a living as a freelance, and I love it with a passion because it gives you an entree into the lives of strangers. I don’t think he thought I was as good as he was, and I think that I unconsciously shifted to [a place] where we wouldn’t be rivals.

How do you feel about nonfiction now?
The First Stone sold a hell of a lot of copies, and from then on I began to feel I belonged on that side of the line. I feel at ease in nonfiction. I’ve learned how to use myself in it: to say to the reader, let’s look at this together.

You love a courtroom, don’t you?
My hearing is going now, so those strange acoustic spaces are difficult. But it used to be that I couldn’t wait to get there in the morning. When you’re watching a trial, you’re watching how society tries to deal with human wildness.

Would you say that in a book like This House of Grief you’re fascinated by the line that separates the person who commits a crime, and the person who doesn’t?
It’s not really a line. It’s a very fine membrane, like a net – and you can put your foot right through it, and down you go. I’m not interested in psychopaths, because there’s no ethical struggle going on.

The American writer Janet Malcolm, a Freudian, has been a big influence on you. Did you mean it when you once said you should have been a psychoanalyst?
I think now that I wouldn’t have been very good at it. When I was kicked out of teaching [for giving an unscheduled sex education lesson], I should have joined the police. I reckon that would have suited me better. But I do find analysis fascinating, especially the way you see it in Malcolm’s work: that extreme concentration on what people are like when they’re talking. I’ve followed her example, especially as it’s laid out in The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, which is fantastic. I had the chance to meet her once. I chickened out.

What are you reading now?
A Heart So White by Javier Marías. I’m loving it. And I’ve had a bit of a resurgence with all those wartime writers called Elizabeth: Bowen, Jenkins, Taylor. Elizabeth Jenkins’s The Hare and the Tortoise is a really great book.

What about your next book?
It won’t be out until November, because it’s about my youngest grandson’s football team – Aussie rules, not soccer. He’s got all these exams, and I thought it would be distracting if there was a book out about him and all his friends. I love football. It’s so beautiful and, to me, heroic. The body language of footballers in moments of shame as well as triumph is like the postures you see in Greek sculpture. Really, it’s a book about men.