Cursing the English weather and nursing a cold, Michelle de Kretser had retired to her hotel bed early last Wednesday. She was roused by a call from her publishers: she'd won the Miles Franklin Award.
Despite finding the world of literary prize-giving ludicrous and arbitrary – "I got lucky on that day, a different group of judges would have come up with different decisions" – De Kretser is obviously delighted with the $60,000 prize. She plans to celebrate by buying shoes.
We're talking as the writer comes to the end of a three-week UK tour to promote her fourth novel, Questions of Travel. Along with the Hay on Wye Book Festival and Worlds Literature Festival in Norwich, the highlight of her trip has been a forum with AS Byatt.
De Kretser, usually cool and restrained, is brimming with excitement at this encounter. "It was amazing, I met her at last. I was terrified but she was so generous," she enthuses. In her review of Questions of Travel for the Guardian, Byatt praised its depth and originality; a novel "unlike any other I have read."
In a world where millions of people are constantly on the move, Questions of Travel explores, through the tales of individuals, the myriad reasons why we uproot ourselves.
"I just wanted to ask some questions," De Kretser says. "Who travels? Who doesn't? Why do they go away? Why do they come back? What is home?"
The novelist wanted to show that not all can travel for pleasure; that there are the global rich and the local poor. She also, she says, wanted to represent the view of the "travellees" – those who are travelled upon by the leisured tourist and the independent (though in reality guide-book dependent) traveller in their quest for cultural "authenticity".
Two main stories are told over a 40 year period, both of which weave in elements from De Kretser's own history. There is Laura, a restless Australian explorer who ends up working for a travel publisher not unlike Lonely Planet, the company De Kretser worked for before embarking on a writing career, and there is Ravi, growing up in Sri Lanka, De Kretser's birth place, who dreams of becoming an IT professional but whose life is undone by the horrors of ethnic violence.
All her novels, she says, are about people "to whom history happens."
There's a tension, especially in her latest, of balancing horrifying events with satire. "I've always been attracted to books that, to use a cliché, can be described as tragi-comic, and writers who convey terrible things but do it with quiet humour," she explains. "Chekhov's the grand figure, Penelope Fitzgerald does it brilliantly."
There are motifs that recur in De Kretser's stories; the prevalence of trees, a preoccupation with dogs, her characters' tendency to cling to objects of no intrinsic value but of great symbolic importance. She's drawn to stray and lost objects she explains, things discarded but with a history, ghosts of a half-imagined past. "They have an aura and I'm a great collector of these things, " she says. Not just items of beauty but also kitsch: "objects cut loose from their mass market origins and granted talismanic powers to evoke historical moments or a personal past."
One of these, a plastic viewfinder showing local German beauty spots that De Kretser found in a junk shop in Heidelberg, appears in the novel, an object of fascination and terror for Ravi's small son Hiran. It is his only chance of travel. Despite arguing that, "to gather up lost bits of the world," is a novelistic impulse, when de Kretser left Sri Lanka with her parents as a 14-year old in 1972, she did so with barely a backward glance and very few possessions, talismanic or otherwise.
It was a decade before serious violence erupted, but they'd been dislodged by the political upheavals at the end of the British Empire. For families like the De Kretsers, who were Burghers of mixed Singhalese and Dutch descent, English speakers and Christians, the writing was on the wall.
Growing up in Melbourne, a degree in French was followed by teaching in Montpellier and an MA in literature from the Sorbonne. De Kretser went into publishing as an editor with Lonely Planet, where she worked for a decade, setting up its Paris HQ. It is a world she satirises in Questions of Travel: the tedium and distractions of office life, and the "hideous corporate speak" with its phrases such as key performance indicators and downsizing. It was the concept of the "37 core-competencies of the entry-level editor", that finished her off, she says. "What about non-core competencies?
A walking holiday in France with her partner, academic and poet Chris Andrews, led to her first novel, The Rose Grower, set during the French Revolution. Published to worldwide acclaim in 1999 it gave her the courage to leave Lonely Planet. Subsequent novels, The Hamilton Case and The Lost Dog, have garnered a swag of awards and also mine her history and heritage; while none are autobiographical, the personal past, she says, is "an inkwell into which all writers dip their pens."
A recent trip to Sri Lanka reminded her of what a society ruled by fear felt like, and the move from Melbourne to Sydney a few years ago gave her fresh eyes to see her adopted country, its wastefulness and beauty, an experience she gives to Ravi in Questions of Travel.
Despite its problems, Australia is a successfully multicultural and cosmopolitan country, she argues. "Our attention is grabbed by racist attacks or race riots in Cronulla, but for the most part we get along and accommodate each other," she says.
A cosmopolitan outlook – "an insistence that there is more than one way of looking at the world" – is vital to social harmony. "Any migrant or person who has lived abroad knows this, women know this, anyone who doesn't occupy the centre knows this and it's important to value it," she argues.
"I'm committed to the idea of a society where there are many different ways of being."
