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Jacqueline Kent

Jacqueline Kent

Jacqueline Kent is a Sydney-based writer of biography and other non-fiction. Her memoir Beyond Words: A year with Kenneth Cook (UQP, 2019) was shortlisted for the 2020 National Biography Award. Her most recent book is Vida: A woman for our time (Penguin, 2020).

Diary by Jacqueline Kent

December 2003–January 2004, no. 257 01 December 2003
September 18 Arrival in Savannah, Georgia, a town that seems to have at least seven syllables to its name. The heat is grey and sullen: the famous Spanish moss on the trees crackles at a touch. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is everywhere; the place gives a general impression of being quite pleased with itself, though both wealth and poverty are sharply obvious. An odd place, perhaps, to ... (read more)

Jacqueline Kent reviews 'Xavier Herbert: Letters' edited by Frances de Groen and Laurie Hergenhan

October 2002, no. 245 01 October 2002
The cover of this substantial volume tells you what’s coming: it features a photograph of Xavier Herbert, sixtyish and fit-looking, standing behind the converted 4WD that constitutes his bush camp and dressed in nothing but a pair of stubbies. His eyes are blazing and a bit mad, his shoulders slightly hunched, and he looks as if he’s been holding forth for some time. To whom? For Herbert, it p ... (read more)

'The Third Element in Biography' by Jacqueline Kent

April 2008, no. 300 01 April 2008
Every biography holds at least three stories, all of which, though very different, are closely linked. First of all, of course, there is the story told on the page – the story of someone’s life. Just below that is the story that consists of bits left over, all those awkward jagged pieces of raw or irrelevant data that have been eliminated. Some rejected from the beginning, others taken out at ... (read more)

Jacqueline Kent reviews 'Xavier Herbert: Letters' edited by Edited by Frances de Groen and Laurie Hergenhan

October 2002, no. 245 01 October 2002
The cover of this substantial volume tells you what’s coming: it features a photograph of Xavier Herbert, sixtyish and fit-looking, standing behind the converted 4WD that constitutes his bush camp and dressed in nothing but a pair of stubbies. His eyes are blazing and a bit mad, his shoulders slightly hunched, and he looks as if he’s been holding forth for some time. To whom? For Herbert, it p ... (read more)

Jacqueline Kent reviews 'Unfinished Woman' by Robyn Davidson

October 2023, no. 458 24 September 2023
Robyn Davidson is still best known as the ‘camel lady’, the young writer whose account of her desert trek from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean with four camels and a dog made her internationally famous. Tracks, published in 1980, has never been out of print. Since then Davidson has led a nomadic life – sometimes living in London, sometimes New York, and often exploring the world’s remote ... (read more)

Jacqueline Kent reviews 'Aphrodite’s Breath: A memoir' by Susan Johnson

June 2023, no. 454 23 May 2023
'Who hasn’t longed to run away?’ asks Susan Johnson at the beginning of this memoir-cum-travel book about her time on the Greek island of Kythera. It is a question that invites a show of hands. Fewer people, however, might be inclined to bring their mothers with them. Johnson’s plan is to spend time with her widowed mother, Barbara, while working as a writer in a place she has longed to rev ... (read more)

Jacqueline Kent reviews 'Lives of the Wives: Five literary marriages' by Carmela Ciuraru

May 2023, no. 453 26 April 2023
This book has one of the most off-putting jackets of recent memory. Elizabeth Jane Howard, glass in hand, is gazing attentively at her celebrated novelist husband Kingsley Amis, who is beaming with self-congratulatory pleasure at someone out of shot. Howard, no mean writer herself, seems to be performing the good wife’s duty of smiling at a joke she has heard at least ten times. It is a photo th ... (read more)

Jacqueline Kent reviews 'Bryce Courtenay: Storyteller' by Christine Courtenay

December 2022, no. 449 25 November 2022
In the introduction to her book about Bryce Courtenay (1933–2012), Christine Courtenay writes: ‘To be Bryce’s wife was both a joy and a privilege, and I remain proud of the contribution I made to our years together. Not long after we became a couple, he said, “I love you very deeply and we make a fantastic team, but you do realise you have taken on a full-time job looking after me? Plus, f ... (read more)

Jacqueline Kent reviews 'Yarn Spinners: A story in letters' edited by Marilla North

October 2001, no. 235 16 September 2022
‘This is a book about friendship and storytelling’, writes Marilla North in her prologue to this artfully arranged selection of correspondence. It begins in 1928 and covers the next twenty-seven years, chronicling the large and small events in the lives of Dymphna Cusack, Florence James, and Miles Franklin, three of Australia’s most vital, fluent, and committed women writers. The book begin ... (read more)

Jacqueline Kent reviews 'Reckoning: The forgotten children and their quest for justice' by David Hill

May 2022, no. 442 24 April 2022
In 1959, David Hill, aged twelve, left England and sailed on the Strathaird to Australia with two of his three brothers. Like thousands of children before them the Hill boys were bound for a Fairbridge farm school. Like thousands of children before them, they had come from a poor background, with a struggling single mother who believed that Fairbridge would give her boys a better education and gre ... (read more)
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