What travel has taught me: Kate Forsyth, author

Australian novelist Kate Forsyth's books have sold more than a million copies globally. They include Bitter Greens, which won the 2015 American Library Association Award for Best Historical Fiction. Her new novel is The Blue Rose (Vintage Australia, $32.99). See penguin.com.au

EXCITEMENT

I always wanted to travel, but my family was poor and there was no money for overseas holidays. I did not leave Australia until I was in my early 20s. I flew straight to Paris, the city I had most longed to visit. I was so excited I was literally trembling as the plane lifted its wheels and launched into the sky. I wanted to see absolutely everything and dragged the man who is now my husband to every art gallery, cathedral and museum in the city. Sitting on the Champs Elysees, drinking champagne and watching the chic Parisians stroll past, was the culmination of a lifelong ambition and taught me that dreams can come true.

AWARENESS

I went to Morocco and Spain for my honeymoon. I spent a month with my new husband wandering through souks crowded with jugglers and snake-charmers, exploring crumbling castles and ancient cobbled streets scented with orange blossom, and staying at the Alhambra palace in Granada where water has poured from the mouths of marble lions into the fountain below for 10 centuries. I have always loved history, but that trip taught me that the romance of the past lives on now, in stones hollowed out by countless feet and in the art and architecture created by people long turned to dust.

DETERMINATION

When my children were aged six, 10 and 12, I flew with them to France and Italy for five weeks while I researched my novel Bitter Greens. I heard so many horror stories about travelling with children, and when we took our seats on the plane, I saw the dismayed faces of all the people around us. I was utterly determined, however. The four of us stayed in an old palazzo on a canal in Venice, and rode in a gondola. My daughter turned seven in Sirmione, a small medieval Italian village with a castle on Lake Garda, and my sons remember riding the cable car up Monte Baldo and having a snowball fight in the middle of summer. I was told that I was a fool to travel with three children by myself; instead I gave them life experiences they will never forget.

DISCOVERY

Every year I travel to the Cotswolds to run a writing retreat and literary tour, and I always try and explore more of the English countryside and its rich folklore while I am there. One year, I drove through a tiny village named Fleur-de-Lis. I stopped to buy petrol, and asked the man behind the counter how a small Welsh village in the middle of nowhere had such a French-sounding name. He told me that it had been settled in the 17th century by French Huguenots, fleeing the tyranny of the French kings. I found this fascinating, and later made it the home town of my hero in my novel The Blue Rose.