Book Realities

Another in our Book Realities series of interviews with independent authors, where we discuss their books, their writing methods and what inspired them to be writers in the first place. In this episode we meet Robert Horne, an avid reader of fiction since childhood when he started on the classic novels his mother put in their bookshelves.

With a BA under his arm, he worked at many different jobs before spending sixteen years as a senior secondary teacher in English and Classical Studies. His first visit to south east Asia in 2008 developed within him a burning interest to write about that area.

His articles have appeared in the Sydney Review of Books, Mekong Review and journals of the Universities of Barcelona and New Delhi. He is the prize-winning author of two books of short stories and completed a Master of Arts in 2012, and in 2017 a Doctor of Creative Arts in Creative Writing. He is now a freelance editor of academic writing, as well as an interested gardener and grower of organic vegies. But it is the flame of fiction writing that still burns most strongly in him.

His novel, Made in Cambodia is a story set in the midst of the upheavals of a developing nation forcing its way into the 21st Century. Ex-Khmer Rouge cadres must live among their former victims, modernism challenges millennia-old spirit beliefs, and young women, who yesterday were destined to remain the centre of village life, today must leave to be factory workers or medical students. It may not be enough that two people are right for each other, the world must be right for them.

Robert was also a long list selection of the ARA Historical Novel Prize, for The Glass Harpoon.