PURSUIT OF PASSION
FINDING HER VOICE WORDS LINDA READ PHOTOS LISA PEARL
AUTHOR RHIANNON WILDE has a habit of hearing voices. They are the voices of her characters, insisting that she write them down. They can also appear before her, fully formed. They even sit beside her on the bus or in the car. It’s a phenomenon that may seem a little unnerving but for Sunshine Coast-based Rhiannon, 26, whose award-winning debut novel launches in July, seeing and hearing the characters that populate her books is par for the course. Henry Hamlet’s Heart, a young adult (YA) queer romance novel set in Brisbane, is a love story that revolves around two best friends in a boys’ school. In 2019, Rhiannon won the prestigious Queensland Literary Awards Glendower Award for an Emerging 40
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Queensland Writer for the unpublished manuscript of the book, which came with a publishing contract. Unsurprisingly, she’s been touted by critics as a new voice to watch in Australian YA fiction. The main character, Henry Hamlet, presented himself to Rhiannon, a quirky former English and history teacher, when she had taken her students on a school trip. “It’s a bit of a funny story,” she says. “I went on an excursion to a cemetery with my year nine history girls, and there was a grave of a man called Henry Hamlet from the Victorian era. Pretty much as soon as I saw the name – I didn’t believe this could happen until it happened to me – I fully saw the character.
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