A Home Between Monsoons and Saudade

There are countries we live in, and countries that hold us. Portugal has become the latter for me. I arrived here after twelve years in Southeast Asia with eight suitcases, the beginnings of a story that had travelled across continents, and a quiet sense that I was stepping into a new chapter of my life. What I didn’t yet know was how deeply this country would shape the final form of that story.

The early pages of The Red Silk Dress were drafted on Penang Island, Malaysia, in the hush before sunrise, in my writing room overlooking the Straits of Malacca, and in small notebooks during long monsoon afternoons. I carried it with me through the temples of Siem Reap and the busy streets of Phnom Penh. These places marked me in ways I still struggle to describe. Paris also appears in the novel, though the Paris I wrote is imagined rather than lived, much like the cities that become mirrors of longing rather than memory.

But Portugal is where I became its author. The editing happened here, not in dramatic bursts, but in the measured, companionable rhythm that this country seems to encourage. It made me wonder how many of us carry unfinished stories, waiting for the right place, or the right pace, to allow them to be completed.

There is something in the atmosphere here that invites reflection without urgency. Perhaps it is the quality of the light, or the way the Atlantic opens out like an unfinished sentence. Perhaps it is the pace of everyday life, the gentle expectancy, the way people linger without apology. Whatever the reason, Portugal gave me the space to return to my manuscript with a different kind of attention. Softer. Steadier. More honest.

Living here has made me think differently about how place shapes us. In Southeast Asia, life unfolded in vivid colour and intensity; everything seemed immediate, heightened, close to the skin. Portugal, by contrast, invited a subtler attunement - the kind of noticing that happens when you stop rushing towards a future imagined elsewhere. It encouraged me to pay attention to the gestures of daily life, the pauses between things, the understated beauty that reveals itself only when you are willing to be still.

I realised, slowly, that a novel is not only written through the unlikely bedfellows of creativity and discipline, but through place. Some places ask us to expand; others help us to listen. Portugal did the latter. It offered a container for the quieter work of shaping a narrative, of finding the emotional clarity required to finish something that began far from these shores.

And in that process, something else shifted. I began to see myself less as a visitor and more as a writer in conversation with a country that was teaching me how to inhabit my own creative life. I found favourite spaces, the kinds of corners where ideas gather. I transported my Asian writing room - the soft red velvet chaise longue, the Parsi Indian writing table - and even painted the wall behind my desk in Malaysian Peranakan blue. Now, at the top floor of my new home, a stone’s throw from the riverside at the edge of the River Tagus, I have sat, again, in the early hours, polishing and shaping every word and verb until a quiet sense of satisfaction settled in my soul. I learned to trust the slow unfolding of things.

Becoming a novelist in Portugal was not a dramatic transformation. It was a gradual settling. A deepening. A recognition that creativity needs a particular kind of soil, and that this country - with its azulejos tiled walls, its winter rains, its effortless blend of melancholy and beauty - offered exactly that.

As I prepare to bring my book into the world, Portugal remains present in ways that surprise me. Not in the story itself, but in the way I have come to understand the act of writing: as something rooted in place, shaped by attention, and strengthened by the quiet courage to stay with a story until it reveals what it needs to say. And perhaps that is why Portugal felt like the right place to finish the book. It carries a natural understanding of longing, what the Portuguese call saudade - the bittersweet space between what has been and what might yet become.

This column will follow that thread: the interplay between creativity, belonging, and the places that shape who we become. In the months ahead, I’ll explore the cultural spaces, hotel lobbies, historical cafés, and antique bookshops that have accompanied my writing life, the conversations and encounters that have deepened it, and the quieter truths that emerge when we pay attention to where we are. With it, I will offer accompanying spoken glimpses into the story. At the end of each column, I’ll include a short reading from the novel, recorded in a place that has shaped, or is shaping, my life as a debut novelist. This month, I begin with the opening paragraph.

For now, this feels not only like the beginning of a new year, but also the beginning of a new chapter - a conversation between a writer and a country that helped her listen more closely. And in sharing, it is my hope that it may help you notice the places that have shaped your own journey, too.

www.theredsilkdress.com

About Natalie:

Natalie Turner is a British author living in Lisbon. Her debut novel, The Red Silk Dress, explores identity and longing. She also works internationally as a leadership advisor and founder of Women Who Lead.

Main image: Natalie in her Lisbon writing room – Photo: Carl Hinds