The next episode in our 2024 season of Imagining the Past features Robbie Arnott discussing with Greg Johnston the many intricacies of writing the novel Limberlost, based on his family folklore and longlisted for the 2023 ARA Historical Novel Prize—Adult Category.
Robbie Arnott’s acclaimed debut, Flames (2018), won a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist award and a Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prize, and was shortlisted for a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, a New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award, a Queensland Literary Award, the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction and the Not the Booker Prize. His follow-up, The Rain Heron (2020), won the Age Book of the Year award, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the ALS Gold Medal, the Voss Literary Prize and an Adelaide Festival Award.
About Limberlost
In the heat of a long summer Ned hunts rabbits in a river valley, hoping the pelts will earn him enough money to buy a small boat. His two brothers are away at war, their whereabouts unknown. His father and older sister struggle to hold things together on the family orchard, Limberlost.
Desperate to ignore it all—to avoid the future rushing towards him—Ned dreams of open water. As his story unfolds over the following decades, we see how Ned’s choices that summer come to shape the course of his life, the fate of his family and the future of the valley, with its seasons of death and rebirth.
The third novel by the award-winning author of Flames and The Rain Heron, Limberlost is a narrative of life and land: of carnage and kindness, blood ties and love.
The Imagining the Past podcast series features authors appearing at the Historical Novel Society Australasia biennial conferences or have been recognised in our $150,000 ARA Historical Novel Prize. Our hosts, Kelly Gardiner and Greg Johnston, discuss researching, writing and publishing historical fiction with acclaimed writers of the genre in its many forms from crime to fantasy to literary fiction, set in eras stretching from ancient times to the Swinging Sixties, and for readers of all ages.
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