Michelle de Kretser is profiled in "The Australian" by Rosemary Neill. De Kretser's latest novel, The Lost Dog, has been shortlisted for the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
De Kretser says the praise and prizes her novels have attracted "increase un-confidence, if that is the word". When her second novel was released, she was worried it wouldn't live up to the success of the first. Now she is uneasy that The Lost Dog -- to be published in Australia, the US, Britain and Italy -- won't match the achievements of The Hamilton Case. "The only thing I know at the end of a novel is how to write that novel; that knowledge doesn't transfer across to the next one," she says soberly.Another reason for de Kretser's trepidation is that The Lost Dog is her first contemporary novel and her first to be set in Australia: "That was scary. That was profoundly scary because I hadn't done it before and with my two previous novels, set in France and Ceylon, the main readers were not going to come from these countries. I was haunted by my own literary past in the writing of this novel, in a funny way." Funny, because being haunted by the past is one of The Lost Dog's principal themes.
