Beachside Bookshop at Avalon on Sydney’s northern beaches is hosting a literary event at the Sneaky Grind on Friday 19 August 2016. Bookseller Libby Armstrong will chat with Helen about the writing of Promising Azra, as well as the research behind it. For more details see the flyer. RSVP essential.
In Leicester I attended Karma Nirvana’s Women Empowerment Roadshow, and met my hero, Jasvinder Sanghera. As you can see, we swapped books, and I’m holding Shame, her own story of escaping a forced marriage.
Advance Reading Copies of Promising Azra have just been printed for the book reps, as the date for the Real Thing edges closer… Books in store 27 July 2016! Stay tuned for details of the Sydney launch.
Promising Azra is my first novel. It was inspired by an article in the Australian in 2012, about Dr Eman Sharobeem’s work in preventing the forced marriages of Sydney teenagers. Until I started my research for the book, I was unaware that child marriage is a growing issue in Australia, the UK, the US, and in many other countries around the world.
Island is a strange word, with all sorts of conflicting notions attached to it. Retreat, relaxation and restoration. Incarceration, abandonment and isolation. The spelling is also a trick; an invitation to homophonous tampering.
“Greetings from…” played with the possibilities of the sound and/or the transcription of the word ‘island’, and what sorts of postcards you might send from such a place.
In 2015 I spent a month in residence at Arteles Creative Center in Finland. During that time I worked on a series of poems based on recognisably similar words from the related Finno-Ugric languages of Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian.
This project was a family collaboration, exploring the transmission (and loss) of culture through generations and displacement. It comprises a series of poems by my mother, daughter and myself, and records our various impressions of ‘Hungarian-ness’.
