Dawn Farnham: For me contemporary fiction writing would be like pulling teeth

Dawn Farnham is so spirited that it is difficult to pin her down to a single place. She was born in Portsmouth, England in 1949 but grew up in Perth, Western Australia. In the sixties, she left for England and met and married her journalist husband, Roger,  and moved to Paris with him. There she learned French and lots of other things and travelled round Europe in a Volkswagen beetle. As her foreign correspondent husband moved from one exotic location to another, she lived in China, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and Singapore. She did a B.A. in Japanese at The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and a Master’s Degree at Kings College.

It was in Singapore that she really found the freedom to pursue an old love–writing. She is the author of many successful novels set in Singapore (The Red Thread, The Shallow Seas, The Hills of Singapore, among others). Currently, she is based in Perth. Her latest novel is A Crowd of Twisted Things. This new novel follows the fortunes of young Eurasian, Annie Collins, as she seeks her baby daughter, given away by her murderous Australian husband as the Japanese tanks rolled into Singapore in 1942, and finds much more than she bargained for.

Here is an exclusive interview with the author.