SOUL SEARCHING

Clare Moleta didn’t set out to be a novelist. “I wanted to be a movie star. Although my dad always said, ‘You shouldn’t be an actor, that’s a really insecure profession. You should be a writer.’ So I absorbed that writing was something I could do, even though acting was what I was most interested in.”

Of course, insecure professions can exert an inescapable pull on people. “I saw acting as glamorous,” she tells the Listener from her home in Wellington, “and I had a very minor career in Perth. I made street theatre and the occasional TV commercial, although when my theatre work became increasingly political, I was never paid for it again.”

For Moleta, who was born in New Zealand but grew up just outside Perth, that passion for the political eventually took her