After 28 years as an airline captain in Australia, Helene Young has swapped the sky for the sea to go in search of adventure with her husband aboard their sailing catamaran. The rural and remote places she visits, along with the fascinating people she meets, provide boundless inspiration for her novels.

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Transcript:

Sarah Williams:            Today I’m chatting with Helen Young. Thanks for joining me Helene.

Helene Young:              Thanks for having me Sarah, it’s lovely to be chatting to you.

Sarah Williams:            We’ve known each other for a few years now. We’re both Queenslanders. Originally met you up in Cannes when you did the Tropical Writers Festival I think in 2016 with Anna Campbell.

Helene Young:              Yes, that was a lovely event and we’re going back up for another one at the end of this year as well, in August this year there’s another Tropical Writers Fest so we’ll miss you if you’re now down in South East Queensland but yeah, I guess it’s like writing life, isn’t it, you get connections in all sorts of strange and wonderful places and it’s nice to still be in contact so thank you.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, no and it was absolutely fantastic and I know you’ve read, reviewed my couple of last books and of course you’ve got the quote on the cover of my new book so thank you for that.

Helene Young:              Well done, you’ve done a sterling job of capturing country life and building some really lovely romances there so well done, watching your career with interest and I’m sure it’s going to continue to take off.

Sarah Williams:            Thank you so much. Because of people like you who are really leading the way with Australian fiction I can’t wait to hear, tell us about your writing journey and how you got into it.

Helene Young:              Mine’s a little longer and little more convoluted than perhaps some authors. I was one of those kids that loved reading, always wanted to be an author but when I eventually left school I really didn’t have any direction and any idea of where I was going to go. I wanted to be a pilot, I knew that as well but really there wasn’t the finances available to just whip off and do a pilot’s license. I went off and did a host of other things before I eventually in my mid thirties I came back to writing. That ironically came about because of flying. We moved from Brisbane to Cannes for my new job with Quantis Link as a first officer and I suddenly found myself having been a flying instructor working long hours to working pretty nice hours in the little Quantus Link airline. I had time on my hands so I sat down and wrote that very first manuscript.

Helene Young:              They say that your first manuscript is always likely to be largely autobiographical and mine was about an Australian girl who goes to Lake District in England and ultimately falls in love with her boss. For those of that know me well, that’s where I met my husband. Anyway I wrote this story and it wasn’t us, it wasn’t about us but it was very much set in the place that we worked and there were people there that way too clearly identifiable, you don’t put real people in your books but certainly they color your story. There would be people up there who would go, “That’s me.” So that story will never see the light of day but it was because of that first manuscript which I shoved in the bottom of a filing cabin...