Leanne Hall, award-winning Australian author for young adults and children recently wrote a letter to Laura Tweedle Rambotham, protagonist of HHR’s novel The Getting of Wisdom, as part of a series produced in collaboration with UNESCO City of Literature Office, where Australian authors explore and dissect a book that has had an impact on their life.
As a student at PLC Leanne was required to read The Getting of Wisdom in Year Seven. She writes about it in a unique and thoughtprovoking way as a ‘problematic’ favourite. Here, with her kind permission are a couple of quotes to tantalise:
-Richardson takes girls seriously at what is sometimes seen as their silliest age. She tails you for the entirety of your secondary school years, diving deep into your psyche, treating you as worthy of the sustained consideration a novel entails.
-Far from being paragons of your genteel education, you and your classmates are dishonest, selfish, social climbing and shallow—in short, quite wonderful.
You can find the full text at: lithub.com/leanne-hall-examin
More about Leanne Hall from her publisher: Her debut novel, This Is Shyness, was the winner of the Text Prize for Children’s and Young Adult Writing and was followed by a sequel Queen of the Night.
Her novel for younger readers, Iris and the Tiger, won The Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Leanne started her career in the world of short stories and has had stories published in Meanjin, Age, Best Australian Stories and the anthology Growing Up Asian In Australia. She hopes to publish a short story collection (one day!) She was an Asialink Artist in Residence at Peking University in 2013 and participated in Australian Writers Week in China in 2014.