Lola Bensky

Lola Bensky is a novel by the Australian writer Lily Brett, published in 2012. Its heroine is a young rock journalist, and the book draws closely on the author's own beginnings as an interviewer of musicians.

Lola Bensky is nineteen, has left school early and is not entirely sure how she got her job. Her hair is ironed straight, her questions are endless, and the newspaper she works for has sent her from Australia to London at the most exciting point in the history of popular music, in 1967.

She spends her days in the company of the musicians of the period, interviewing them in hotels and backstage rooms while trying to work out her own life, which includes being the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Brett was born in Germany to parents who survived the camps, and the novel sets the glitter of the music scene against what the heroine carries with her into it. The book moves between London, New York and Australia, and between the present of the interviews and the past she is trying to understand.