10 Quirky Questions with author Libby Hathorn

1. What’s your hidden talent?
Inadvertently killing every rose bush that I hopefully plant!

2. Who is your favourite literary villain and why?
Count Dracula

3.You’re hosting a literary dinner party, which five authors would you invite? (alive or dead)
William Shakespeare (geinus writer poet playwright), Judith Wright (poet extraordinaire), Maggie O’Farrell (Hamnet), May Gibbs (Snugglepot and Cuddlepie), Louisa May Alcott (Little Women), Alice Munro (short story).

4.Which literary invention do you wish was real?
Time travel

5. What are five words that describe your writing process?
Secretive, urgent, fulfilling, constant and magical.

6. Which are the five words you would like to be remembered by as a writer?
Satisfying, inventive, imaginative, moving, productive.

7. Picture your favourite writing space. What are five objects you would find there?
Light all around, bookshelves, the small sculpture of a French girl ( a gift), favourite pens. pencils. sharpeners. erasers and such, piles of manuscripts, silence.

8. Grab the nearest book, open it to page 22 and look for the second word in the first sentence. Now, write a line that starts with that word. (Please include the name of the book!)
Jill by Philip Larkin.

Hearing silence at last, my heart steadied and my hands stopped shaking as I approached the light.

9. If you could ask one author one question, what would the question be and who would you ask?
New Zealand author Catherine Mansfield, a great short story writer. I’d ask her: What triggers the original idea of short story for you?

10 Which would you rather do: ‘Never write another story or never read another book’?
Hideous question, but I could never stop reading.

Libby Hathorn is an award-winning author and poet of more than 80 books for children, young adults, and adult readers. Her recent picture book No! Never!, written with her daughter Lisa Hathorn-Jarman, won the CBCA Children’s Picture Book of the Year Award, Younger Readers, 2021. Translated into several languages and adapted for both stage and screen, her work has won honours in Australia, the United States, Great Britain and Holland. She is the recipient of the ABIA Pixie O’Harris Award, 2022, and the Lady Cutler Award, 2020, for distinguished services to Australian children’s literature. In 2014 she won The Alice Award, a national award given to ‘a woman who has made a distinguished and long term contribution to Australian literature’. In 2017, she won the Asher Award, a peace prize, for A Soldier, a Dog and a Boy. Libby is a keen educator who has lectured part-time at Sydney University and is devoted to being an ambassador for poetry anywhere and everywhere. She has been a National Ambassador for Reading and often acts as a judge for various literary prizes, including the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. For more information, see www.libbyhathorn.com.

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