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The disappointment might have been palpable; a Lord of the Rings fan, barely into her 20s, gets to travel all the way from her home in England to New Zealand and she sees … the inside of a meeting room and her hotel.
Such was the 2013 “flying visit” British author Samantha Shannon made, direct from the Supernova Pop Culture Expo in Australia, where she did, at least, visit a zoo and cuddle a koala.
A decade on, Shannon, now known as “the reigning queen of epic fantasy”, returns to New Zealand for this month’s Auckland Writers Festival and hopes there will be time for at least a visit to Hobbiton.
“I love Lord of the Rings; I love the Star Wars films and have done ever since I was a kid,” she says, on a Zoom call with the listener.co.nz from her London home. “I’m one of the very few people I know who loves the Star Wars prequels a lot. I love politics so I liked the politics of it, the stuff like that.”
Whereas other youngsters might have been watching LotR or Star Wars purely for entertainment, Shannon, now 32, was more likely to be taking notes about story structure, world-building, and character development.
She started writing “little stories” and stapling them together when she was just 8 or 9 years old. She wrote her first novel, Aurora, when she was 15 but it was rejected by publishers. That turned out to be a good thing, she says, because she could use many of its concepts for her later work.
In 2012, aged just 20, she signed a six-figure book deal with Bloomsbury Publishing for that later work: The Bone Season series of epic dystopian novels centred around “dreamwalker” Paige Mahoney, who joins the resistance in the oppressive Republic of Scion where clairvoyancy has been outlawed.
Shannon’s first book of the series, The Bone Season, became a New York Times and a Sunday Times bestseller – as have her subsequent novels – and she was dubbed the “new JK Rowling”. It was an experience Shannon found overwhelming, as most 20-year-olds still at university – in her case, Oxford – would have done.
“It did give me a great start to my career, so I am very grateful for that, but mentally it was a bit of a challenge because I was this very shy, very introverted teenager,” she recalls, sounding a good deal more confident but not a bit smug or conceited.
“I was a teenager when I wrote the first book and 20 when I signed the book deal and suddenly I was flying all over the world, doing interviews and photo shoots. That’s something I enjoy now, but at the time, I just didn’t know how to handle it all.”
The pressure to be “the next” or “the new” JK Rowling
“I remember doing an interview and someone said to me, ‘You’ve sold well but not as many as JK Rowling, though’. How could anyone ever live up to that? I always wanted to say, ‘Actually, I’m the first Samantha Shannon, not the next anyone else at all’, and I am fortunate because I built my own readership who liked my writing.”
Shannon’s mental health spiralled as she tried to adjust to the new level of scrutiny and public interest while sitting final year university exams. Family and friends circled the wagon; she took some time out from university and told herself it was enough just to pass.
“I didn’t know any other writers really at the time, though, so whenever I meet debut authors now, I always tell them, ‘Try to find a circle of writers because it is an unusual career, and I think it’s good to know people who are in the same circumstances’. I really didn’t know how to negotiate the space, but my publisher was wonderful and that helped.”
She giggles, ever so slightly, when talking about how wonderful her publisher has been lately. Bloomsbury planned to publish 10th-anniversary editions of the first four books in the Bone Season series – the fifth comes out next year – perhaps with new covers or a different font, but Shannon had a different idea.
“I decided it was as good a time as any to shoot my shot, so I asked, ‘How would you feel if I revised it?’ I wrote The Bone Season when I was 19 and still at university; I’m still working on that series now but I’m 32, with 10 more years of writing experience under my belt so I wanted to bring those earlier books up to the standard that I’m writing at now.”
Shannon confesses she might have said the changes would be “small”, which persuaded Bloomsbury to let her write a sample chapter: “I don’t know if you’ve ever used track changes on Microsoft Word before, but, you know, it turns the sentence like a really aggressive red and underlines. There was a lot of red and underlining…”
Nevertheless, she got the green light to make her edits and has worked simultaneously on revising her earlier novels, writing the fifth Bone Season book, and starting an entirely different series called The Roots of Chaos. That grew out of what was originally planned as a standalone high fantasy, The Priory of the Orange Tree (also a best-seller).
“It has been a lot of work, but it’s been almost cathartic, in a way, because it was almost as if I got to have a conversation with my younger self.”
A love of history and politics
Even the most diligent writers might find it tricky to keep track of myriad characters and worlds, but Shannon has had more practise than most. She can’t really recall a time in her life when she wasn’t reading or writing.
Her parents, concerned at how little sleep she was getting, confiscated her keyboard at one point. Shannon managed to find a “work around”, discovering a keyboard that could be controlled by a mouse and made less noise than the gentle tapping of keys.
She acknowledges writing was an addiction, but looking on the bright side again, says it allowed her to find the one thing she wanted to do in life very early on. And from very early on, Shannon also loved history and politics, which, she says, feels natural when you grow up in a city like London, where you walk towards a modern skyscraper, round a corner and confront a Roman wall.
Layers upon layers of history, many built on political machinations. The Tudors captured her attention as much as the Star Wars prequels. The common theme? Politics. But Shannon was also reading and watching dystopian fiction – The Hunger Games was a big influence – and wondering what was going beyond the narrow settings of the books and films.
While dystopian fiction tends to tightly focus on what’s happening in one city, in one country, to one group of people, fantasy is more likely to be epic. What would the possibilities be, wondered a teenage Shannon, of combining the two approaches? It was an approach that led to what she calls epic dystopia.
“I love dystopia; I love that it pushes characters into such extreme situations that you get to see bits of their personality that you might not otherwise. But I also love world building, constructing epic backdrops for them.
“When I start to construct a world, I ask myself a lot of questions. If it’s a dry place, I’ll start by asking, ‘How are the characters getting water?’ and the more questions, and answers, the more the world grows. I might not answer those questions on the page, but I’ll have it in my head. It’s almost what readers see as the tip of an iceberg.
“With the world of The Bone Season, that was an alternate version of our world, which is a bit easier in terms of world building because, essentially, I’m working with the real world and making changes based on a difference in the timeline”.
From ideas to key concepts
Medieval and Elizabethan history inspired The Priory of the Orange Tree and A Day of Fallen Night. Memories of school trips to places like Hampton Court Palace came to the fore, followed by her devising what she terms “the key concept”.
For The Bone Season, she imagined what modern-day witch hunts might look like; for Priory, it was the legend of St George and the Dragon centred around the supposedly distressed – and mostly nameless – damsel.
Sitting ever so slightly forward and leaning towards the camera, Shannon explains her frustration, even as a child, with being unable to find out anything about the damsel. “You never heard her name or knew anything about her. She was just a prize for the knight in return for killing the dragon”.
Clearly irked, Shannon decided to turn the legend on its head. What if the damsel slew the dragon, but St George got all the credit? With storylines like those, and formidable female characters to match, it’s little wonder women make up the bulk of her legion of fans.
“I would love my books to appeal to all women. I remember having conversations with my mum, who turned 60 this year, about how, when she reached 40, she felt as if she was disappearing from a lot of the media she loves.
“I think that the older we get as women, the more we do start to see ourselves disappear, but I don’t think that applies to men. I want to write about things that have historically impacted women, like childbirth, menstruation, menopause, marriage - so many things that I think were not really given that space in literature.
“I want our perspectives to be there, and I think with what’s going on today, when you hear the types of misogynistic things some public figures say, it’s more important than ever that we give women’s perspectives that space in media.”
Providing space extends to the kinds of characters she writes, including older women, people of colour, and queer people. Shannon acknowledges that by doing so, her writing can be interpreted by some as a political act.
She avoids reading reviews of her books but occasionally, she’ll see a comment on a social media post she’s been tagged in, stating that by writing the kinds of characters and storylines she does, she’s “pandering” to women or gay people.
“I find it really strange that you can’t focus on a female character or a queer person without someone assuming you’re trying to do something political. It’s like our very existence is politicised. If you had a whole cast of men, no one would comment on it. I mean, look at the Lord of the Rings.”
The other comment that has left her feeling ever so slightly chagrined is that re-writing myths and legends to centre female characters is a mere trend. Shannon says she doesn’t much care whether or not a particular genre is considered to be fashionable.
“I’m writing a novel about the Greek goddess Iris and someone said to me, ‘Oh, aren’t you worried that the Greek goddess retellings are going to be done by the time it comes out’?
“Well, no is the answer to that because I write what I’m passionate about and I don’t think that certain things like reimagining historical and mythological women’s stories and giving them a voice should be considered a trend. It’s too important for that”.
Samantha Shannon will appear in conversation with Nalini Singh at the Auckland Writers Festival, May 14-19. For more information visit www.writersfestival.co.nz and to get tickets go here