Rodney Hall is the author of more than thirty books. He has won the Miles Franklin Award twice, for Just Relations (1982) and The Grisly Wife (1994). Many of his novels and poems have been published internationally. Rodney lives in Melbourne.

Why do you write?

I write for a reader, any reader – just one – who is willing to participate on a creative level in the experience of my book. I do not plan my novels, and I think if I ever did I would lose interest in finishing them. Nor do I ever alter the order in which the narrative unfolds. Otherwise, how would I keep track of what my reader knows and doesn’t know? I don’t care about plot. Instead, the aim is to transmogrify experience. What drives me is the music of the sentence. It’s all about a shared energy with the reader. That’s what fires me up.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

I dream a great deal, sometimes waking midway through and plunging back in. I am very much against any attempt to interfere or interpret dreams (i.e. strip them of the intangible by imposing logic on what is intrinsically non-logical).