‘It just wants to be written’: Hannah Kent returns to Iceland in debut memoir
Adelaide writer Hannah Kent reflects on the country that stole her heart and the dark Icelandic story that brought her international fame.
In 2013 Hannah Kent created a literary sensation with Burial Rites, a debut novel exploring the life of the last woman to be executed in Iceland. Now she returns to the scene of the crime.
The memoir Kent said she would never write, Always Home, Always Homesick, follows her as a young exchange student whose year away began as a struggle, but blossomed into something magical and formed her as a writer. It also describes the unsolvable mysteries that shadowed her research into the life and death of the accused murderer and domestic servant, Agnes Magnusdottir.
“You will find me changed,” Kent wrote to her parents at the age of 17. “Iceland has acted like a breath in my life.”
Kent had been driving around northern Iceland with a host family when they pointed out the desolate rocky outcrop where Magnusdottir was beheaded with an axe. At the time, Kent was wrestling with the trauma of her arrival, which saw her stranded late at night at Keflavik Airport and desperately homesick. A security guard at the airport told her to get on a bus into town where she was met in Reykjavik by her contact — who was still in his dressing gown, having mixed up her arrival date by a week. Then, the first host family she was placed with seemed to just tolerate her presence.
The year away forced Kent to be resilient, but also encouraged in her a sense of wonder that has marked her writing ever since. She describes the ecstasy of lying in the snow and surrendering to the beauty of the Northern Lights as they washed over her, and wondering if she could ever use writing to capture such brilliance.
The Icelandic landscape that Kent first glimpsed as a teenage exchange student. Photo: Supplied
“I have always had that capacity for wonder and I think without Iceland it would have manifested in another way,” Kent tells InReview. “But I was so deeply and seriously encouraged by people there — it wasn’t like ‘you’re just a teenager writing your angsty poetry’. They were saying, ‘you should do this, this is valid, this is deserving of your time and attention’.”
Kent had applied for a Creative Writing course at Flinders University before leaving, and upon her return her new lecturer, the late Ruth Starke, encouraged Kent to pursue the story she had first heard in Iceland.
Magnusdottir’s life and execution had stayed with her in uncanny ways. She began dreaming about Magnusdottir before she knew anything about her life, dreams she captured in her journals. Often, her dreams were experienced from Magnusdottir’s point of view.
“I could feel people’s horror and their attitudes towards me, they were the first initial dreams,” she says.
The dreams abated when she returned to Iceland for a research trip. When she returned to Australia, thinking she had enough material to begin writing, they became more intense.
“To the point where I would wake up, I would be crying. I was struggling to know how I was going to write the execution scene because I had never had that experience and nor had anyone else,” she says.
“Then I had the most intense dream about it … and I went straight away and wrote it because I was so shaken by it and all of that writing is in the book and unchanged.”
Kent cannot say whether she was visited in dreams by the spirit of Magnusdottir, or if it was simply the story playing out in her subconscious.
“I am happy for it to sit in both camps,” she says. “One thing is for sure; I would not have been able to write the book without them.”
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She is also agnostic about the astonishing connections and events that followed her in Iceland, including the coincidence of having unknowingly spent her first night in Reykjavik sleeping in the National Archives — that host in the dressing gown was an archivist who lived onsite. On her return visit in 2010, she discovered more about Magnusdottir than in the previous two years, including an itemised list of her clothes and belongings at the time of her arrest.
Kent returned to Iceland pursuing the story of Magnusdottir. Photo: Supplied
Staying on an isolated farm, Kent happened upon a rare book with a chapter on Magnusdottir that had eluded her in Iceland’s libraries. It led her to a surreal story about a Reykjavik woman, who in 1932 began receiving messages from Magnusdottir from beyond the grave. Through a process called psychography or ‘involuntary writing’, the woman claimed to channel Magnusdottir, who wanted her bones exhumed and moved to consecrated ground. The medium was even instructed where to find Magnusdottir’s head, long thought to be lost, along with a description of her skull with a snapped-off piece of wood inside it — evidence of being displayed on a pike after her execution.
The woman’s instructions led to the skulls of Magnusdottir and her co-accused being found, and eventually reburied. The supernatural circumstances seemed incredible, yet there was no other explanation for how the bones were found.
“It is extraordinary,” Kent says. “I have very little doubt because no one knew where [the bones] were, even the local farmers didn’t know, there were no records, just ‘buried in the vicinity’… and the woman had asked that she not be named until after her death because she wasn’t doing it for attention, or for fame. It was not about her in any way.”
Kent is content to let these unknowable elements lie — after all, the forces that shape her work have often come from somewhere deep and subliminal.
“I feel like they present themselves to me, the stories and the characters,” she says. “And I know when this is the case because my mind keeps circling back to them. It gets to the point where I am so irritated by the frequency of this that I think, ‘well, it just wants to be written’.”
Always Home, Always Homesick (Picador Australia)
Kent once told friends she would never write a memoir because her life was not sufficiently interesting, but in recent years the thoughts, memories and questions about her connection to Iceland kept persisting. The memoir begins during the pandemic, at a time when Kent was struggling with writing anything at all.
“I was really struggling to find a way how to write because before I had kids, I was very regimented in my writing, I was very disciplined,” she says.
Kent, who has two children with her wife, Heidi, was nursing their two-week old son at the time and felt alienated from herself and the world.
“Then I was sleep deprived, my children had additional needs, and you suddenly have a body that you’re not really acquainted with.”
So, she did what Icelanders used to do during the dark winters: she brushed away the gloom by telling a story, about Iceland, and how it became her muse and gave her life its powerful direction.
“Writing has always been the way I make sense of the world,” she says. “For the first time in my life I began to really reflect on how much that first trip to Iceland affected the trajectory of my career and also how much it has shaped me as a person.”
Always Home, Always Homesick by Hannah Kent (Picador Australia) is out now