Kristina Olsson as Brisbane-based writer. She worked as a journalist for many years, writing for The Australian, The Courier-Mail and The Sunday Telegraph. She has written novels and memoirs, including In One Skin (2001), Kilroy Was Here (2005) and The China Garden (2009), and Boy, Lost (2013) won the 2014 NSW Premier’s Prize for nonfiction and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. In this interview she discusses the ways in which memory and history intersect with place, the subject of her essay published in Griffith Review 44: Cultural Solutions.

I know you studied journalism and worked for a long time as a journalist before publishing your first novel. Do you think there’s a difference between people who start off writing fiction and then write nonfiction, versus people who start off writing nonfiction and then write fiction? Do you think the order matters and whether it affected the way you write?