SOURCE: “Janette Turner Hospital: The Australian Writer Finds Inspiration for Her Fiction in Her Own ‘Dislocated’ Life,” in Publishers Weekly, September 14, 1992, pp. 80-1.

In the following interview, Hospital discusses The Last Magician and the influence of place and personal experience on her fiction.

Janette Turner Hospital is, simply put, a natural Scheherazade.

It's not just that she saw in Scheherazade, who told tales to save her life, “the perfect narrative framework” for her 1989 novel Charades. It's that the primitive force of her fiction, its command of the sensuous as well as the spiritual, leads a reader of her five novels and two collections of stories to believe that she, too, is telling tales to stave something off, to “negotiate” her own life. In The Last Magician, her newest novel, published this month by Holt, Hospital explores the secrets of the Queensland rain forest as well as life in...