Robyn Cadwallader

Robyn Cadwallader's new novel is The Anchoress.

From a Q & A at her publisher's website:

Who would you say is your ideal reader?

My ideal reader is anyone who engages with my words in any way, and one of the true delights of having a book published is to discover the range of responses readers can have. A few years ago, when my collection of poetry, i painted unafraid, was released, some people preferred to read the narrative poems, some liked the ideas. In one review, the reviewer highlighted a poem as her favorite that I thought was one of the weakest of them all! Perhaps the very best response was from a friend who works in palliative care, who used a selection of the poems for meditation during a simple service about grief. He chose poems that I had not even dreamed would be suitable but he framed them with his own thoughts, and I realized that he had read them in quite new and startling ways from my own.

And since The Anchoress has been released in Australia and the UK, I’ve had messages from all kinds of people: some say that it’s too slow; some say they decided to read it over a length of time, not to rush it; some say they couldn’t put it down and had to stay up late—one woman even wrote to tell me she had it propped up while she was peeling potatoes for dinner! I hadn’t intended to write anything like a page-turner, so it made me look at the novel in a new way. And a few readers have written that my main character...[read on]

Visit Robyn Cadwallader's website.

--Marshal Zeringue