JR Thorp

How did you become a writer?

When I was a very small child, I wanted to own a bookstore, because I was allowed to spend a remarkable amount of time in libraries and running my own bookshop seemed like the best possible future. In about fourth grade, I mentioned this ambition to an elderly teacher, who informed me with great sniffiness that "ladies don't own bookshops". With the unquestioning seamlessness of small-person logic, I thought, "Well, I'll write books instead." I've since realised that people of all stripes own bookshops and I'm not even close to being a lady, but the die was cast.  

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

I had a shelf of most beloved books for ages in Australia: Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, Ovid's Heroides, Patrick White's Voss, a complete Emily Dickinson collection, Umberto Eco, Anne Carson, Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces, Helen Vendler's annotations of Shakespeare's sonnets – it's a long list. My literature tutor, Gordon Shrubb, was enlisted by my parents in mid-high school to help me stop running riot in English classes, and was responsible for many of the things on those shelves, from Robert Browning to Virginia Woolf. (If it counts, Impressionist and Pointillist paintings, too.) 

When and where do you write?

Mostly in cafés with movie soundtracks, though I do have a study at home when something is proving particularly difficult and I need to be essentially trapped in one spot to get it done. Spotify informs me that in 2020, the year of editing Learwife for publication, I was the only person whose most-listened was a playlist of shrieking medieval bagpipes (I like the composer Jed Kurzel). 

What are you working on now?

I'm currently on the second draft of my second novel, which is about translators, people-smuggling, family secrets, architecture, and how the past can eat you. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I suffered from something I think is quite common in young writers, which is consuming worry about Being A Writer rather than actually writing. I was so battered with anxiety about making every sentence worthy that I essentially wrote a novel into the ground. I had to get over it and recognise that I was in service to an audience, not to any self-concept of status, before I could work properly.  

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

Try everything – every genre, every commission, whatever you've got time and space to try. My Masters at Oxford was a gift because they essentially threw you into every possible form (radio drama! prose poems! lyrics! scriptwriting!) over two years, and you had to give it a shot. If you say yes to a thing and don't know how to do it, don't be afraid to learn from others or teach yourself.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Find a philosophy of failure. (This worried my agent when I said it in my first big newspaper interview, but I continue to believe it's a valuable piece of advice.) You will fail a lot, even if you are extremely gifted/lucky/connected/have succeeded previously, and if you don't manage to detach your self-worth from your work and its reception, you will fall into a hole and won't be able to do anything. If possible, find a skilled therapist, but do have a support network to help you through. Also, don't compare yourself to anybody else if you can help it, and if you can't help it, see therapist advice above. 

JR Thorp is an Australian writer. Her first novel, Learwife (Canongate/Pegasus), was a 2021 Waterstones Book of the Year, an Apple Books and Audible pick, an Independent Fiction Book of the Month, and was longlisted for both the Walter Scott Historical Fiction Prize and the Authors Club Debut Novel Award. She is the recipient of a Markievicz Award from the Arts Council of Ireland, and lives in Cork.