Tracy Farr: 2009

Tracy Farr's novel The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt was published by Fremantle Press in July 2013. Tracy completed the first draft of the manuscript while she was a visiting writer at the Michael King Writers' Centre in 2009. The work is a fictional biography about Dame Lena Gaunt — octogenarian, junkie and theremin player — taking the reader from Malacca to Perth and from 1920s Sydney to New York and London, spanning Lena's life as a musician. Born in Melbourne, the daughter of a record librarian and a TV star, Tracy Farr grew up on the other side of Australia, in Perth. After five years in Canada in the early 1990s, she's been living and writing in New Zealand since 1996. Her short fiction has been published in New Zealand and Australia in anthologies, literary journals and popular magazines, been broadcast on Radio New Zealand, and been commended and shortlisted for awards in Australia and New Zealand. She lives in Wellington, and when she's not writing fiction she works as a scientist. Tracy stayed at the Michael King Writers' Centre in September 2009 and wrote: "I started the novel in 2008, when I was Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers' Centre in the hills above Perth. Life got very busy in the interim though, and I only ever seemed to peck away at the novel. I knew that I needed time in retreat from distractions to get the novel back on track. The front bedroom here is a perfect writing retreat. Half way through my eleven days at Michael King Writers' Centre, I've pulled the manuscript into shape, hooked its different sections together. I'm delighted — and a little astonished — at how concentrated my work has been here."