Paula Xiberras
Author Loretta Hill loves Tassie, especially the scenery, the food and the brewries!
I recently chatted to Loretta on one of her free Fridays, that being the day Loretta, a busy mum of four and farmer, gets some additional help from a nanny so she can close the door to her study and get down to some writing.
Loretta, in spite of all of her commitments, is a prolific author whose stories are most often played out in Australian small town settings. Loretta believes that people, in spite of most of us living in the city nowadays, are attracted to the nostalgia of Australians historically living remotely and how these communities help and support each other through tough situations.
Loretta’s latest novel is ‘The Grass is Greener’, the story of two friends Claudia and Bronwyn who both crave the others existence. Bronwyn is a lawyer that would rather work in Claudia’s family vineyard and Claudia who was forced to work in the vineyard due to tragedy, wants to reclaim her early love for the law. The girls decide to swap careers, realising eventually, that sometimes you can be more content in your own paddock!
As well as writing rural romance, Loretta is a renaissance woman that possesses some surprising qualifications for an author. It was her dad, a mechanical engineer who encouraged her to pursue a reliable occupation and so Loretta qualified in structural engineering and commerce at the University of Western Australia and went on to work for an engineering company but eventually chose fiction as a career, which had always been her love from childhood and the good news is that yes, her dad is her biggest fan.
‘The Grass is Greener’ is out now published by Random House Australia.
