Kate Winslet and right Rosalie Ham.
The Murrumburrah Writer’s Group is proud to announce that the Authoress Rosalie Ham, will be coming to the twin towns on the 13th November 2019 at the Harden Public Library. Ms Ham will be speaking from 2pm.
Spokesman John McAvoy said “This is a wonderful outcome for Harden and shows just what we can accomplish when we put our minds to it. Sharon Hawkins and Robin Cooper have worked hard getting the numbers to win this privilege. So it is up to us all to attend this once in a lifetime chance to meet an eminent and well regarded writer whose works include “The Dressmaker” which has been made into a movie starring Kate Winslet.” Ms Ham is also a part-time Literature teacher at Trinity College at the University of Melbourne and RMIT University TAFE. Her novels have sold 75,000 copies worldwide and have been translated into a number of languages including German and French.
John said, “ The good people of Harden-Murrumburrah have told us that they wish to attend this wonderful event. Let’s give Rosalie a warm country welcome and make her feel at home. See you all there.”
Background
The Dressmaker is a Gothic novel written by the Australian author Rosalie Ham and is Ham’s debut novel. It was first published by Duffy & Snellgrove on January 1, 2000. The story is set in a 1950s fictional Australian country town, Dungatar, and explores love, hate and haute couture. Since its release the novel has sold over 75,000 copies and has been translated into a number of languages including German and French. A film adaptation of the book was released on October 29, 2015, with Kate Winslet as the protagonist Tilly Dunnage. A special film tie-in edition of the novel, featuring a new book cover with Winslet as the titular character, was released worldwide from August to October 2015. The tie-in-edition of the book sold 90,000 hard copies and 20,000 ebooks.
The novel is Rosalie Ham’s first published novel and was picked up for publication within a year after Ham finished writing it. She sent the manuscript to four publishers and received rejections but on one of the readers’ advice she sent her manuscript to Duffy & Snellgrove, who picked it up for publication. According to Ham, the novel is a product of serendipity. In 1996, she enrolled in the writing programme of RMIT University but on her arrival she found that it was already full.
As she was leaving, novelist Antoni Jach advised her to take a novel course instead. In novel-writing class, she got an assignment of “a 500-word synopsis of her book”, which she recalled as “I had an idea and started writing it. Then you had to hand in 3,000 words, and then you had to hand in 10,000 words, and I had 30,000 words. It was only three weeks before I realised that this was the best ‘accident’ that had ever occurred to me.”
The novel is set in a small country town of Australia. Ham, who herself was born and raised in the southern New South Wales town of Jerilderie, said that she was inspired by the fact everyone knows everything about each other and “(her) mother was a dressmaker in a small country town, and the idiosyncrasies of those two factors were the seed for the story”. But she clarified that she did not intentionally use a country town based on her own experiences as she explained that “My experience in my home town was the absolute contrary (to Dungatar).”
