I grew up in Sydney and had a pretty normal childhood with my brother and two sisters. We lived most of our lives in the backyard, doing typical Australian things, but once in a while, it wasn’t Sydney anymore – because our parents told us their stories. That was when a piece of Europe entered our household, and our lives.

It was never an organized thing. My mum and dad never sat us down and said, ‘Now we’re going to tell you where we came from.’ It was spontaneous. Something would happen, usually in the kitchen, and then came a story. We would hear about cities of fire, bombs shaking the ground, and what it was like to emerge from underground to discover that everything had changed.

One evening, I remember my mother telling us about something else she witnessed as a child, which has stayed with me a long time.

She told us of the time she saw Jewish people and other so-called criminals marched through her small town, on their way to Dachau. At the back of the line, an old man, totally emaciated, couldn’t keep up. When a teenage boy saw this, he brought the man a piece of bread and the man fell to his knees and held the boy’s ankles, thanking him…That was when a soldier marched over, tore the bread from the man’s hands and whipped him for taking it. Then, he chased down the boy and whipped him for giving him the bread in the first place. It was a story of great cruelty and kindness, simultaneously.

I didn’t know it at the time, but almost all of the stories my parents told were full of opposites: right and wrong, fear and relief, destruction and humanity. The other point I didn’t realize was that these stories became like a second language to me, and when I became a writer, that language was already there – just waiting. It was waiting for me to scratch the surface, reach in and pull it out as the beginnings of a book.

At first, The Book Thief was supposed to be a small novel – only a hundred pages or so – but the more time I spent with it, the more it grew, in every way. As three years of work went by, it changed from a book that meant something to me to a book that meant everything, and I’m very grateful for it. I’m also grateful to every reader who has picked it up and given it a chance. They’ve been more generous to The Book Thief than I could ever have imagined.

You’ve been described as both a YA and Adult writer. In the USA your last book, The Book Thief, was released as a YA book, while in Australia it was Adult and in the UK it was both… What do you consider yourself to be?

I try not to think about categories any more. My goal is simply to write a book that will, hopefully, become someone’s favourite book. If I fall short it’s no disgrace - there are so many great books in the world… To write a book someone might love, seems to be the best ambition to have, I think. 

My feeling is, you have to trust readers and hope that the book finds itself in the right hands. In my case, with The Book Thief, I’ve been amazingly lucky. It seems to have found an audience with both.

USA YA Release Australian Adult Release

UK Adult Release

 UK YA Releases

I live near the beach, and a great park. If I’m not at either of these places, I’m in the backyard.

Or doing the dishes.

Also I’ll read.

After all, that’s why I wanted to be a writer in the first place.

My new book is called Bridge of Clay. It’s different again from what I’ve done before, and I hope it will be better than the last book…

I’ve changed in just about every way since I started writing. I’m both less patient and more patient, more and less confident…The only thing that hasn’t changed is that I still end up at the desk somehow. I have a lot of days where I’m plagued by doubt and have trouble with the work, but I always come back. Maybe that’s just because I’m not qualified to do anything else, but I’m not so sure.

Max is not mentioned in the epilogue, ‘Death and Liesel’, because there is a tiny chapter simply called ‘Max’, which is dedicated to the vision of those two meeting up after the war in Alex Steiner’s shop.

This then leads to the question, ‘Did they stay together and get married?’

It’s up to the reader, as characters in every book must live on in the minds of readers as they imagine where they might go. In this case, in my own mind, Liesel and Max don’t get married. They do keep in contact their whole lives and have that connection, but I really just felt they needed to restart their lives fresh, alone and away from all of that mess. Also, I figured if Rudy couldn’t have Liesel, no-one from that world could…

I used to lie about this, but now I actually know –

I started writing when I was sixteen. I’m well into my thirties now. I get my ideas from twenty years of thinking about it.

I was sitting in a park one night eating fish and chips and saw a bank with a fifteen minute parking zone out the front. I thought, Fifteen minutes, that’s not very long – every time I go the bank it takes a lot longer than that. I then thought, What if you were in that bank when it was being robbed and your car was out in the fifteen minute parking zone? How would you get out to move your car to avoid getting a fine? That gave me the bungled bank robbery scene that led to everything else in the book.

When I was growing up, I wanted to be a house painter like my father, but I was always screwing up when I went to work with him. I had a talent for knocking over paint and painting myself into corners. I also realized fairly quickly that painting bored me. When I was a teenager, I read some books that brought me totally into their worlds. One was The Old Man and the Sea and another was What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. I was also inspired by S.E Hinton’s novels – The Outsiders at the start, but as time went on, more so by Rumble Fish. When I read those books, I thought, That’s what I want to do with my life. After many rejection letters, it took seven years to get published, and there were countless daily failures along they way as well. I’m glad those failures and rejections happened, though, because they made me realize that what I was writing just wasn’t good enough – I had to push myself to improve.

I think the main thing is to not be afraid to fail. You’ll be rejected by publishers. You’ll have days of complete lack of faith in your abilities. But you have to keep coming back. That’s when you know you’re a writer – when you take the failures and appear at the desk again, over and over again.

I’m grateful for the books I did read as a young adult: The Outsiders and Rumble Fish by S.E Hinton, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape by Peter Hedges, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. The interesting thing is that I was given Catch-22 as a 16-year-old and couldn’t read it. The point is, it was shown to us by our high school teacher of the time. They knew that a lot of us wouldn’t get through it, but we might later on; we knew it was there. I’m grateful to those teachers for that – for having the courage to give us books we might not like at the time, but would appreciate later on.