Hello and welcome to Meet the Writers.
I'm Georgina Godwin and the show today is being recorded in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia.
My guest was born in Melbourne but has lived here in Ubud for 30 years.
Her memoir, Fragrant Rice, is an account of her life on this fabled island,
interspersed with Balinese recipes and insights into local traditions.
She's also created the International Ubud Writers
and Readers Festival in response to the 2002 Bali bombings.
It's been named by Harper's Bazaar UK as one of the top festivals in the world
and by ABC's Asia Pacific Network as the next Edinburgh Festival of Asia.
She's built up a hotel and three restaurants, a cooking school.
She runs the Ubud Annual Food Festival, and she guides spice tours out to far flung islands.
Janet Denef, welcome to Meet the Writers.
Now, we're recording this in Ubud in Bali, and there are a lot of extraneous noises,
so we're going to ask people to bear with us because actually there's so much nature around us,
there's so much music, and there's also quite a lot of industry.
Ubud is a very long way from where you started today.
Tell us about where you were born and brought up.
I was born in Melbourne, Australia, and first came to Bali in 1975.
My dad had a bit of pocket money and wanted to take us on an adventure.
And he didn't want to go to the regular usual suspects.