Always Home, Always Homesick

When Hannah Kent was 17 and had just completed secondary school, she was awarded a Rotary exchange scholarship. She applied for the program knowing that she could be sent anywhere in the world, but she could not have known her placement in a remote fishing village in northern Iceland would change her life as dramatically as it did. Without that exchange, she would not have been captivated, or perhaps even haunted, by Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last woman executed in Iceland, and her award-winning, bestselling debut novel Burial Rites would likely never have been written. It does seem certain, however, that Kent could not have avoided being a writer.

Always Home, Always Homesick is Kent’s memoir of her time in Iceland. It transports the reader to another time and place, to a culture that reveres stories and storytelling, and into the inner world of a born writer. After a slightly rocky start when nobody arrives to collect her from the airport, the exchange unfolds with varying degrees of success at the homes of different host families amid Kent’s culture shock, which will eventually transform and grow into a deep appreciation and love of the people, the landscape and the language. Kent’s understanding of herself grows in parallel, revealing a latent sense of vocation. Having forged lifelong connections and feeling fundamentally changed, Kent returns to Adelaide at the conclusion of her trip but is drawn back to Iceland time and again, in ways she can’t always explain.

In examining her evolution as a writer, Kent offers resonant insights into the value of creative endeavour and a portrait of a country actively committed to its language and storytelling. Exquisite and self-aware, Always Home, Always Homesick is a luminous reflection on love, writing, and the importance of stories.