The Australian writer Helen Garner, 83, has won the Baillie Gifford Prize. She has a gift for capturing the tribulations of relationships
Readers of The Oldie will love How to End a Story by Helen Garner, which has just won the Baillie Gifford Prize.
Garner, 83, is a celebrated Australian writer of novels, screenplays and non-fiction. Her diaries are a delicious mix of little chunks of thought: caustic views of her everyday life, together with snappy aphorisms.
She quotes the 1902 diary of painter Paula Modersohn-Becker: ‘Marriage does not make one happier. It takes away the illusion that had sustained a deep belief in the possibility of a kindred soul.’
And here is Garner in 1984:
‘“If I asked you now to drop everything and run away with me,” said K, “you wouldn’t, would you.”
‘(Hangs her head) “No. But I would’ve. Once.”
“What changed?”
“I started thinking.”’
