By Rebecca Thurlow

Ahead of this interview with Ingrid Betancourt, I'm a little apprehensive. This is a woman who was held hostage by Marxist rebels for six years in the Colombian jungle. After one escape attempt, the guards chained her to a tree by her neck every night for the next four years. She was caged, tortured, beaten and survived to tell the tale. I'm expecting someone tough.

The 49-year-old mother of two walks through the door of the Siebel Pier One hotel in Sydney's historic port district in a flowing silk dress. She is soft-spoken, with a slim figure silhouetted against the water and blue sky of Sydney Harbour.

It's May, and Ms. Betancourt is in Australia for the Sydney Writers' Festival, where she has been discussing her book "Even Silence Has an End," published by Virago Press in September. "For me, there was no option but to escape. I had to get back to my children. I wanted them to know I had done everything possible to get back to them, even if I died in the attempt," she says.

The book recounts, in almost 600 pages, her detention from 2002 to 2008. She was taken by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, while campaigning for the Colombian presidency on an anticorruption platform, and lived in fear of execution with 14 other hostages.