Ilka Tampke

Photograph © Kathy Mexted

About The Author

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.

Books by Ilka Tampke

How to Love the World

Perhaps motherhood is always a promise that cannot be kept.

When her children are born, Nellika vows she will be the perfect mother. Motherhood is sacred, mythic: it will remake everything that is broken in her. But as her children grow, something buried is awakened, and th...

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