Bernadette Brennan

And I've also found...

In every panel I've been on, the judges take it very seriously and put in the really hard groundwork effort.

So I'm a great supporter of the whole process.

Absolutely.

I actually have it on my list to read and I'm just enthused by listening to this conversation.

Well, that's exactly what she has done.

This mixture of an intimate, powerful family story mixed into a huge narrative of...

civil war, colonialism, violence, loss, love in, as you say, the country we know as Burma.

I was a bit sceptical to begin with about this novel.

It had lots of fantastic reviews from, you know, the big American journals saying how wonderful it was.

And I felt to an extent that there are moments in it where it is overwritten.

You have to accept I'm coming off the back of Helen Garner.

I've become a slasher.

So it's an interesting question that she chose to use a novel as a novel form.

I think it's a really fantastic form to do a big story of a political story, which we've seen in Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and Kim Scott's Taboo.

I think they do that brilliantly and use the novel form in that way.

This one, it's based on Charmaine Craig's family.

So that gives it an authenticity.

Which is quite extraordinary.

And that it was actually her mother, Louisa, who is the young girl in the story who is crowned Miss Burma.