I did my MA in Creative Writing at Macquarie University and my major project was a 70,000-word work of fiction. I have always loved writing fiction but at some point, lost my Lust a little. (Well, more than a little. I took a long, long break from writing fiction and have only seriously returned to it in the last two years.) But what Lust I lost to create worlds, I gained to examine my own.

You see, when I moved to Germany on a wing and a prayer, I blogged. I blogged before, too, but I suddenly had much, much more to write about. From the moment I left Sydney, I turned to my blog as a way of understanding and examining my new life and the new places I inhabited. For a while, those places changed. A week in Shanghai and London, a summer on the island of Santorini. And then I moved to Germany to begin my planned six-month working holiday stint. As I flailed around with the language and the weather and the people, I wrote and wrote and wrote. I loved blogging. It kept me writing regularly, it introduced me to a readership and it pushed me in the direction of a genre I remained in for years: the personal essay.

In 2016, I gathered my favourite blog posts and published them in one volume, Heimat: Notes from an Australian in Germany. This collection spans five years, ranging from the bewildering early encounters with Germanic habits and customs to the later, more established musings on home and belonging.

The birth of my children, within twenty-one months of each other, provided me with the richest, most complex fodder I had yet encountered. I wrote to understand them, to understand motherhood, to feel the distance between me, my home, my family. Now I Climb Rocks gathers together the threads and thoughts of early motherhood, when it was all new and I was trying to figure out how to do it in a country not my own.

And then came the pandemic. I kept a diary, of sorts, in which I made myself write something, anything, daily. It was 2021. What a strange, strange year. But, as I wrote, other things emerged, because life simply went on. My latest collection of essays, The Therapy of Puppy School and Other Essays is as much about the pandemic as it isn’t.

And now? Now I’m back to fiction. My 80,000-word manuscript, a work of contemporary fiction, bounces between the wild coastline of New South Wales and an isolated but beautiful Baltic Sea village in Schleswig-Holstein. I hope you can read it soon.

The Therapy of Puppy School and Other Essays

2022 – epubli

The Therapy of Puppy School captures a globally extraordinary year, playing out in an ordinary life. What started out as a simple journal became a collection of essays that ducks and weaves between all of the worry and uncertainty the pandemic brought with it and the seasons of life that continued regardless.

”I found myself writing about the beginning of my second act as a mother. Week after week, I kept notes on the therapy of puppy school, on relationships with language, on books, on friendship, on regret. The pandemic is there, in this book, of course, humming in the background, drawing the lines we had to stay within, dominating what we read, what we listened to, expanding our vocabulary with new terms and ideas. Pissing me off. Pissing us all off. But it isn’t everything, because – as I came to realise – it wasn’t everything. How could it be?”

Available in paperback and ebook via epubli and Amazon Germany, USA, Australia and UK.

If you’re in Germany, you can also buy the paperback and ebook through Thalia, Amazon, Apple Books, Kobo, Hugendubel. Genial Lokal.de 

Now I Climb Rocks

2019 – epubli

How much of who we are is where we come from? How do we give our children their cultural inheritance when we are so far removed from it? And is it possible to learn an entire language in a birth prep class? In this collection of essays, Liv Hambrett dives into her own experiences of pregnancy and the early years of motherhood as they played out in a country and language not her own. Poignant, funny and personal, Now I Climb Rocks explores how raising children in another country can make us question our very ideas of belonging and becoming.

Available in paperback and ebook via epubli and Amazon Germany, USA, Australia and UK.

If you’re in Germany, you can also buy the paperback through Thalia, Buchkatalog.de, Amazon, or Hugendubel.

The ebook is available on Amazon, Apple Books, Kobo and Geniallokal.de.

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Heimat

2016 – epubli

Comprising the first five years worth of essays and blog posts from my German adventure, Heimat is a collection of stories, ideas, and meditations on all of the dust you kick up when you move countries, when plans and expectations go out the window. It is about relationships; with countries, with people, with ourselves. It is about the Germans, their beautiful country and being quite foreign within it. It is about having a Heimat and finding another on the other side of the world.

Buy Heimat here in paperback or hardback. Available in paperback and ebook via epubli and Amazon Germany, USA, Australia and UK.

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What I Know About Germans

2013 – epubli

The enormous response to the viral blogpost What I Know About Germans led to the development of an illustrated book, a collaboration between Überlin, artist Josh Bauman and me. 101 points, fantastically illustrated by Josh Bauman, with an introduction.

You can buy WIKAG in paperback and ebook via epubli and Amazon Germany, USA, Australia and UK.

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Sincere Forms of Flattery

2013

A beautiful, illustrated anthology where some of the most exciting voices I know pay homage to their literary inspirations. This e-book contains short stories inspired by Ian McEwan, Colette, Raymond Carver, Ann Radcliff, Neil Gaiman and Douglas Adams from writers Lee Zachariah, Foz Meadows, Kailash Srinivasan, Therese Raft, Antonia Hayes and … me. It is edited by Sandi Sieger and myself, and illustrated by French artist, Amandine Thomas.

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The Modern Woman’s Anthology

Palmer Higgs Publishing, 2010

Alongside esteemed Australians Libby Hathorn, Dr Gene Sherman, Dr Cindy Pan and Jane Grieve (to name a few) I contributed a short story – With the Rain – to the Modern Woman’s Anthology, published by Palmer Higgs. Launched late June 2010, by Therese Rein, it is available for purchase with proceeds going to the Black Dog Institute. Buy a copy on Amazon.