AMANDA HAMPSON

Novelist Amanda Hampson was born in New Zealand but has lived in Australia for 40 years. Her latest novel, 60 Summers (Penguin), is her fifth.

How did you become a writer?

I grew up on a dairy farm 15km outside Hamilton and went to a little two-room school. We didn’t have a TV, so books were our entertainment. From about 10, I wanted to be a writer. My dad was from Liverpool; they’re storytellers like the Irish, so it was in my blood. My first novel, The Olive Sisters, was published in 2005 when I was 50. It was a best seller, which was like a dream come true as I had wanted to write a novel for all those years.

What inspired you to write 60 Summers?

I wanted to take three old friends ‘on the road’. Three women go off looking for their lost hopes and dreams, retracing their steps of many years ago. It’s fiction but I did go backpacking around Europe in ’78, and I used the experience of going to those countries. I also went back in early 2018 and travelled for six weeks, making notes as I went – it was like taking an imaginary friend on a trip. The book is about friendship. I hope it will inspire women to look at their own lives and see if there are any changes they would like to make.

Do you tend to draw on your own life in your books?

I had my first son at 17 and had to give him up for adoption. I was reunited with him in 1993 when he was 22. We found we are very similar personalities – brutally sarcastic. The story of him sort of comes out in The Olive Sisters – it’s about a woman who discovers she’s not who she thought she was, and her mother is not who she thought she was. It’s about the sense of displacement that a lot of adopted people have. Having to give up my child gave me a great sense of compassion for other people.