Across three decades and seven novels, Michelle de Kretser has grappled with history, identity and relationships, while testing the boundaries of literary forms. Her most recent novel Theory & Practice won Australia’s Stella Prize for Women’s Fiction 2025 and more recently the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction 2025, reaffirming her place as one of our greatest living writers.
In the award-winning novel, it’s 1986 and “beautiful, radical ideas” are in the air. The narrator is looking back at a pivotal moment in her life: she has arrived in Melbourne for graduate school, researching the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students—and Kit—who claims to be in a “deconstructed” relationship, beginning a series of messy entanglements that place her life and ideals at odds.
Experimental in form, she has called the novel ‘hyperfiction’—fiction that poses as non-fiction—blurring the lines between truth and drawing into question the storyteller’s role. Over Zoom from her book-lined study, she spoke to me about her long career, recent award success, and the responsibilities of a writer today.
Congratulations on the prize! What does the recognition mean to you so deep in your career?
Oh, I feel very lucky. It’s great to have your work recognised and awarded by your peers. Of course, the money is fantastic too—not only in helping me to live, but it also means I can help other people.
Let’s go back to the beginning – what first sparked your love of reading?
I’ve been a reader for as long as I can remember.
Growing up in Ceylon in the 1960s, there was no television—reading was all that there was. I read everything that was around in the house and that was a very eclectic mix, from children’s classics and comic books to schoolgirl stories inherited from older siblings. Agatha Christie, Just William, Victorian and Edwardian poetry anthologies that I read for the rhythm, for the music.
They were books that were left over from the British Empire. There was almost no English language publishing coming out of Ceylon at the time. So it was that or nothing. I’m sure some of it would’ve been very jingoistic nationalistic—lots of Kipling, for example—but you would also get slabs of Shakespeare, Tennison, Christina Rossetti.
I think the content to a child hardly matters. I think what you want to instil is a love of reading. Taste comes later.
And when did that love of reading shift into wanting to be a writer?
I studied French literature at university, and I went on to start a PhD, which I never finished. It really wasn’t until I was about halfway through my PhD that I realised I don’t have the mind for an academic career. I don’t have that narrow, concentrated scholarly mind that goes deep. I have a magpie mind that likes to pick up bits of glitter from here and there—that’s quite a good mind for a writer.
I started editing a student journal called Antithesis, ironically enough. And I loved editing—how a piece could come in, and I could work on it and it would go out better.
I worked for 10 years as an editor. And then when I had a year’s unpaid leave from my job, I started writing a story set in revolutionary France in an area my partner and I had been walking the previous year, just to amuse myself really.
I think if had sat down at my desk and said, I’m going to write a novel, I would not have. It just would’ve been too daunting. But then after a while I realised that I was writing a novel and that novel was accepted for publication, The Rose Grower.
So you tricked yourself into becoming an award-winning novelist?
It’s what the mind does. Yes, I absolutely tricked myself. But I’m glad that I had a life before becoming an editor, before becoming a writer. I have life experience to write about, to reflect on. You look back on things and their shape changes, their meaning changes. And you can write about that.
“I have a magpie mind that likes to pick up bits of glitter from here and there”
You moved to Australia aged 14 and have travelled extensively. How has this experience influenced your work?
Travel has played a large part in my life, so that is always going to be of interest to me thematically. And where a novel is set will often determine its course as much as the time in which it’s set.
A case in point is my latest novel, Theory & Practice, which starts in 18th century France before jumping to ‘80s Australia.
Obviously France in 1789 is going to be one set of concerns for the characters and one set of limits of what they know and can see. 1986 in Melbourne is a very particular moment in time, and the place, St. Kilda, a very particular place in Melbourne with a very specific iconography. So, place is woven into the fabric of the novel.
I know there are some novelists who are just not at all interested in place. But I guess for me, having moved around quite a bit in my life, I’m always observing the differences—people behave differently in different places.
Theory & Practice also plays with form–it opens as a classic novel, then shifts into a mix of letters, diary entries, fragments of essays. I’ve called this genre, ‘hyperreal fiction’ and define this as a novel that reads like nonfiction basically. I’m happy to have come up with that term. I must say it means that people will not believe that it’s not all true though.
What’s been the most surprising reaction to the novel?
A lot of young women have really responded to this book, which is fantastic. A friend of mine did it in her book group recently where most of the women were under the age of 35. For the first 20 minutes, they had a very literary discussion about fictional form until one of them said, “You know, I dated a guy like Kit once”. And then they all just talked about terrible boyfriends for the rest of the hour.
What advice do you have for budding writers?
First, support your fellow writers. Always. Second. Read, just read everything. Read, read, read. And third and very important, revise, revise, revise. And by revising, I mean cut, cut, cut.
What’s the role of a writer today?
I think the role of a writer has always been to try to tell the truth, and that can make you unpopular. I was very struck recently by a piece in Harpers magazine by Pankaj Mishra where he was pointing out how very few American writers have put up some kind of opposition to Trump’s America. Where there is this sort of slide into fascism, where are the writers protesting this? His point was that he thinks the writers in America are very comfortable–they are working within institutions, they have residencies, they have grants—and this means they are reluctant to oppose the state openly.
I don’t know, perhaps if I had the equivalent of ICE agents trying to deport me, I might be much less outspoken.
