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Ilka Tampke is an award-winning author, academic and teacher. Her first two novels explore the druidic culture of Ancient Britain and its disruption by Roman colonisation. Skin (2015) was published in eight countries and nominated for the Voss Literary Prize and the Aurealis Awards. Songwoman (2018) was published in five countries and won the Small Press Network Book of the Year Award in 2019. Ilka was the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre Writer in Residence in 2019 and has lectured and presented at many festivals and organisations around Australia. She teaches creative writing at RMIT University and is currently completing a PhD in Australian forest poetics at La Trobe University.
‘I devoured this book, enlivened by the gorgeous depictions of the natural world and captivated by the robust meditation on love, anger, and regret. Ilka Tampke captures both the exquisite beauty of the forest alongside the light and shade of a life. Hypnotic, poetic, and devastating, How to Love the World explores the uneven texture of motherhood, and artistry, with painful precision and courageous depth.’ -- <B>GEMMA PARKER, author of <I>The Mother is Restless and She Doesn’t Know Why</I></B> ‘A soaring hymn of praise – to motherhood, to nature, to the fragility of human existence. I’ve never been so breathlessly invested in a fictional character’s fate.’ -- <B>SIAN PRIOR, author of <I>Shy: A Memoir</I></B> ‘How to Love the World is a remarkable book. It conveys a tender love for Country and family, while recognising the destructive potential of both. This is also a story of courage and nail-biting drama. Ilka Tampke is a writer who deeply values language and storytelling. This is a book that will not leave you.’ -- <B>TONY BIRCH, author of <I>Women & Children</I></B> ‘A gritty, luscious, eucalyptus-scented novel shot through with anxiety and the dark beauty of forest. How to Love the World unpicks the paradoxes of motherhood – the love, the suffocation, the violence, the joy – weaving ideas of belonging and un-belonging, roots and deracination, blood, soul, and longing into an entanglement that for Nellika the protagonist is equally destructive and regenerative.’ -- <B>MIRANDA DARLING, author of <I>Thunderhead</I> </B> ‘What does it take to remake yourself? How to Love the World doesn’t shy away from the intensity and challenges such as reckoning demands. The result is a book that is as life- affirming and beautiful as it is shattering.’ -- <B>SOPHIE CUNNINGHAM, author of <I>This Devastating Fever</I></B> ‘A fierce, tender, unflinchingly honest novel about motherhood, selfhood, the meaning of home and the fragile miracle of being alive. Compelling, wise and impossible to forget. I adored it.’ -- <B>EMILY MAGUIRE, author of <I>Rapture</I></B> ‘Tampke’s sentences gleam. A vivid and courageous book.’ -- <B>CARRIE TIFFANY, author of <I>Exploded View</I></B>
