Kacen Callender’s unforgettable new fantasy Queen of the Conquered explores thorny questions of race, privilege and power in a lushly detailed Caribbean-inspired setting. Sigourney Rose, the only leader descended from indigenous islanders in the colony of Hans Lollik, tells herself that her ruthless mission to become the ruler of all the islands will enable her to free the enslaved, but her own personal vendettas and quest for power complicate her every move. We talked to Callender about the intersections between discrimination and privilege, the history that inspired Queen of the Conquered and more.

Was there a real-life inspiration behind the character of Sigourney Rose? Readers will really be torn between rooting for her and being afraid of her, but there’s no doubt she’s a unique protagonist on multiple levels.
Yes, I was inspired to write Sigourney Rose’s character in part from history and in part by my own experiences as someone who is oppressed but also has privilege. When I was in high school, I first learned that Black people had also once owned slaves, and that fact stuck with me throughout the years as I wondered what sort of person would degrade their own people for the sake of power.

This was a horrifying quality of Sigourney’s since she does own slaves who’re also islanders, and as the main protagonist, I knew that she had to be sympathetic at least on some level for readers to care enough to continue reading about her journey. Her family’s massacre at the hands of the colonizers was a part of this. I also wanted to explore what I think is a relatable conflict of being oppressed and knowing discrimination, but also having privilege, and in some ways contributing to systematic oppression simply by existing in a society that feeds on others.

“When I was in high school, I first learned that Black people had also once owned slaves, and that fact stuck with me.”

How did growing up in the U.S. Virgin Islands influence the setting of Queen of the Conquered? When you started writing, did you ever see yourself penning a novel set in a world inspired by your particular experience?
The U.S. Virgin Islands, which were once part of the Danish West Indies, were the inspiration for the fantasy world. The royal island of Queen of the Conquered is called Hans Lollik, for example, which is an island in the USVI. The language in Sigourney’s world also borrows from Danish. The magical ability in the book is called “kraft,” which means “power” in Danish—power as an ability, but also power as in privilege.

Growing up in the U.S. Virgin Islands did also influence the story as someone who was a local but attended a private school where for a few years I was the only Black, local student in the class. I faced horrific bullying and ostracization almost every day of my life by white students, but it was privilege that let me attend a private school. Throughout my life I’ve found myself in similar situations where privilege got me a place or position, but I’d be the only Black person in the room facing discrimination, which inspired Sigourney’s character. I love my home, and I’ve always wanted to write novels set in and based on the U.S. Virgin Islands, so hopefully there are many more to come.

What is your favorite genre to read? What drew you to write in the SFF genre?
I honestly don’t have a favorite genre to read. I love it all—it just depends on whatever mood I’m in. I do love speculative, though, because SFF is a metaphor for the real world and lets us take a look at our world from a different lens, which can sometimes offer even more clarity than if we had written about our world in a contemporary setting. Writing a contemporary about the intersection of privilege and discrimination might not have made the same points about power and systematic oppression in the way that I was able to in Queen of the Conquered.

"Writing a contemporary about the intersection of privilege and discrimination might not have made the same points about power and systematic oppression."

What settings have you not yet covered in your novels that you would like to escape/travel to through your fiction? What’s your favorite geographical location to write in?
Because I write contemporary, magical realism and speculative for both children and adults, I spend a lot of time thinking about real settings for the contemporary books and the pieces that could be taken from those places to create fantasy spaces. But I also like to look for the magic in the real world. I’ll walk around St. Thomas or my new neighborhood in West Philadelphia, and I’ll look up and see an alley or a field that feels out of place and stories begin to spark. There was once a park I’d walked through in New York City where suddenly the trees were almost too big and too green, butterflies started to rise from the grass with every step, and when I looked around there were no other people in sight. I began to think I’d walked into a completely different world. I turned a corner and got to the street where the city reappeared. When it was time to go home, I tried to find that section of the park again, but it’d completely disappeared and was replaced by swing sets and people walking their dogs. It’s possible I just made a wrong turn and/or that I have an overactive imagination, but it’s pieces of magic like this that I like to collect to create worlds.

“I . . . like to look for the magic in the real world.”

Sigourney eventually realizes that in certain lands, she is lumped into the same category as other people of color and inevitably endangered. All the while, the islanders of Hans Lollik fear and despise her for her psychic and political power. In your research and personal experience growing up in the islands, what did you unearth about the peoples who were colonized by others at this time? Were any of their stories the inspiration for Sigourney’s family?
There weren’t any specific stories that inspired Sigourney’s family besides what I’d learned in high school about Black people who did own slaves. Any research was focused on slavery in the Caribbean and what our ancestors had to endure to survive. There’s another key piece about slavery in the Caribbean that I did a bit of research for, but don’t want to discuss it here because it would risk spoiling the ending of the book.

This book introduces the concept of kraft, a unique reference to psychic power that is passed down through the family. Sigourney’s kraft allows her to manipulate but also experience others’ emotions, whereas others hold the power to commune with the dead, extract the truth, etc. What inspired this particular system of magic?
Kraft is specifically a mental ability, and just like in the real world, mental ability and talent is evenly distributed among all of us. However, the Fjern—the oppressors of Hans Lollik—declare that only they are allowed to have kraft by the divine right of their gods, and any islander found with kraft is executed. This is a metaphor for our world, because we also don’t allow everyone with ability the opportunity to use their talent to further themselves in the way that the Fjern do in Queen of the Conquered. People of color face mass incarceration and execution and racism and systematic oppression, taking away so many of our chances to use our talents and abilities as well.

It’s clear that Sigourney’s mental health has understandably deteriorated after the murder of her family and her continued participation in the kongeligs’ cruelty towards, genocide of and enslavement of the islanders. How important do you feel talking about mental health is for fantasy authors and authors in general, regardless of the genre they write in?
This is a close subject to me because of my own struggles with mental health, and I do often find myself writing about mental health at least in some aspect in most of my books. I don’t think that it should be a requirement for anyone to speak or write about mental health because this is something that can be triggering, and not everyone is in a place where they can speak or write openly about mental health. But, if authors are able to and feel inclined to do so, then it’s an important topic and the act of doing so could be potentially life-saving.

“We tell ourselves that we would’ve been better than our ancestors.”

Sigourney’s self-hatred and fear are palpable. How did you feel writing a protagonist who isn’t 100 percent admirable?
I wanted to write a protagonist that was morally gray because it feels more realistic and honest and vulnerable to me to write a character who struggles with many qualities that I do also. I face discrimination as a Black, queer and trans person, but I also have privileges that give me a comfortable home, food and water and education and the laptop that lets me write these books. There are people who would be able to do the same if they’d been given the same privileges as me. I think of how, in our society, so many of us like to consider ourselves the heroes of our own stories. We tell ourselves that we would’ve been better than our ancestors: We would’ve fought slavery, fought internment and concentration camps, stopped genocide. Yet these are all things that are happening in the world right now, and I feel a helplessness and hopelessness that Sigourney also struggled with. I think it’s important to wash away the ego and come to terms with the fact that we’re all morally gray people like Sigourney, who also aren’t 100 percent admirable, because then we’ll be able to begin to create real change.

Sigourney experiences a web of feelings, both physical and emotional, towards others, but she’s more focused on her own situation and end goals. What was your aim in writing a book about coming-of-age and aspiring towards ones’ goals, no matter what they might be?
Sigourney’s goals are technically admirable and understandable: She tells herself that she wants to take power back from the Fjern who have colonized her islands, enslaved her people and massacred her family for revenge. But what interests me most about any character’s goals are the complexities. Sigourney tells herself that she wants to take power back from the Fjern for the sake of her people, but she has to grapple with the idea that her desire for power might actually be for herself and her selfish greed. She tells herself that she acts for revenge, but she treats her people the same way that the Fjern do, and is no better than the other kongelig, or nobles, of the royal island. Though it seems that Sigourney always aspired to her goals no matter what, her path is filled with self-hatred and doubt, and this is coupled with the mystery of the murders of the kongelig, Sigourney often questions herself. My aim was to complicate Sigourney’s path realistically.

You’ve also worked as an editor, acquiring inclusive fiction and bringing a diverse array of voices to bookshelves. What do you hope readers will discover about the world or themselves after reading the books you’ve edited and acquired as a publishing professional?
I was an editor for children’s books, so for young readers, I always hope that they’ll come away from the books I edited with validation and self-love. I wanted marginalized voices to feel seen and heard since there’s so little representation for us.

Speaking of diversity in publishing and SFF, how do you think your books help add to this movement towards multicultural/LGBTQ+ fiction and representation of all sorts of character identities?
I think that my books specifically add to the movement of Black identities. I don’t want to write for people of color of cultures and identities other than my own because I don’t know their experiences and I don’t want to take space when I know there are others who’re trying to write their own stories and their own books. I hope that adding my voice to the mix as a Black, queer and trans person from the Caribbean allows others who share any piece of my identities to feel seen, especially as I keep writing and keep getting more stories with different mixtures of my identities into the world. I hope that people from other cultures and communities can read my books and see characters and cultures they might not see often enough, enriching their own worlds also.

What’s next for you and your writing? Will there be a continuation of Sigourney’s story, or the story of the people of Hans Lollik?
Yes, there’s a sequel titled King of the Rising, which will be from Løren’s perspective following the events of Queen of the Conquered.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Queen of the Conquered. 

Author photo by Ashlee Cain.

Alina Boyden’s gorgeous, transportive debut novel, Stealing Thunder, synthesizes Mughal Indian history and her own anthropological work with the transgender communities of South Asia to create a richly detailed fantasy world. Here, Boyden shares how she developed the fabulous clothing of Daryastani society, why she developed an “anti-dragon” and more.

This is your debut novel, and it’s haunting, gorgeous and amusing at all the right moments. What places and times would you like to travel to in your fiction going forward?
First of all, thank you so much for that lovely compliment. I am definitely continuing the story of Razia and Arjun with a sequel. I’ve written that one, and it broadens the horizons of the world of Stealing Thunder quite considerably. I’m also working on some non-Razia related projects. Currently that is taking me to the south of France and to Spain in the 13th century, though it won’t be a historical fiction piece, so that’s just the inspiration. It brings me back to my undergraduate years as a medieval studies major. But there are so many other places in the world and so many other cultures that I find deeply inspiring that I think if I’m lucky enough to have the sales figures to keep my career going, I will have no shortage of places and times to visit.

“. . . to see communities of (largely) transgender women, which have existed for thousands of years, was awe-inspiring to me.” 

Readers may not know that the hijras in Stealing Thunder are inspired by the real-life communities of the same name in Pakistan, which you’ve studied during your work as a cultural anthropologist. When did you first learn about these communities, and why do they fascinate and inspire you?
Well, for starters, the communities in Pakistan are properly referred to as “khwaja sira” communities. In Pakistan, “hijra” is often considered to be a slur. In India, “hijra” has greater currency as an autonym and is not nearly so often considered to be negative in its connotation. I chose to use “hijra” as a term because it has so much wider currency in American discourse than “khwaja sira” does, and because the word “transgender” in English is such a recent innovation that I felt it might distract readers from the fantasy world I had created.

I first learned about hijras when I was 12 or 13; I suppose I was, like a lot of trans women, searching the world to see if there are others out there like her. You see, when I was growing up, I was taught that being transgender was a modern phenomenon, that trans people didn’t exist in other countries, that we were a particular pathology rooted in the modern West. So to see communities of (largely) transgender women that have existed for thousands of years was awe-inspiring to me. Most trans women I know in America grew up believing they were alone. Each of us had to learn for herself what being transgender even was, because there was so little cultural understanding of transness as a phenomenon.

So to see a culture where not only is transness broadly known and acknowledged, but these trans women live together in their own communities—that was really shocking to me the first time I came across it. It made me realize that things didn’t have to be the way that they were for me growing up in America. There are many other ways that transness can operate in the world, and one of them is this radically visible and community-oriented form that we see in the hijra and khwaja sira communities of South Asia.

Your description of Razia and her hijra sisters’ transitions is eloquent and beautiful, normalizing the process to readers even when the other members of Daryastani society may not feel the same way. As a trans rights activist, was this a stance that you knew you wanted in the book from the beginning, rather than the oft popularized stories of only hardship and pain?
Absolutely. If there is one pernicious myth that needs to be addressed in our own society, it is the idea that transition-related treatments are as painful or more painful than gender dysphoria, or that they are imperfect facsimiles of cis experiences. Those ideas permeated my own upbringing and my own early understanding of transition, and they are myths that I only banished within myself somewhat recently, because they are so virulent.

I’m not really sure why cis people are so taken with the idea that transition-related procedures are painful or damaging or imperfect. Maybe it’s because cis people don’t have gender dysphoria, by definition, and therefore they imagine what it would be like to undergo those procedures themselves and come away horrified. Maybe it’s something else. I don’t know what being cis is like. But for trans people, it’s actually the reverse. The procedures are not horrific, damaging things; they are profoundly mundane medical interventions which result in bodies that largely feel normal—often for the first time in our lives.

Now that’s not to say that every trans person needs or wants the same (or any) medical interventions in their lives. However, for those trans people who do medically transition as a result of the dysphoria they experience, the decision to begin transition or to have surgical intervention can be fraught with fear and doubt because of the salacious misinformation that they have been exposed to. The truth (as I have experienced it as one trans woman) is that the medical interventions in my life were not only greatly beneficial in terms of my mental well-being but also have given me a far greater sense of normalcy than I ever expected they would.

I wanted to include that sense of normalcy in Stealing Thunder. I wanted to normalize the physical experience of being transgender without centering the narrative around medical interventions or physical changes. I did this quite consciously, because cis people seem to focus far more on our hormones and our surgeries than we do in our daily lives. Yes, for many of us, those interventions are a part of our lived experiences. Yes, I do wake up every morning and take estrogen, and take it again before going to bed, and have since I was 18 years old. But I don’t really spend a lot of time dwelling on it. I don’t view it as particularly central to my daily lived experience, and it’s certainly not something that, if I were writing the novel of my life, I would spend a whole lot of time on. So, when writing the novel of Razia’s life, I didn’t spend a lot of time on it either.

When did you first become fascinated with the Mughal Empire, and why do you think that era of history is so resonant for you?
I’ve been fascinated by the so-called “Gunpowder Empires” of the 16th and 17th centuries for as long as I can remember. This was a period when the military dominance of European powers was something still on the horizon. It was a time when Ottoman armies besieged Vienna, and when India was the wealthiest country in the world. These empires represented a substantial fraction of the world’s population, a substantial fraction of the world’s GDP and produced some of the finest art and architecture ever to be found anywhere on the planet. If I had not experienced the incredibly Eurocentric public history education that we have in the United States firsthand, I would be genuinely baffled as to why anyone looking at the 16th and 17th centuries would be so focused on the activities of a tiny, dreary island in the North Atlantic when they could focus on the Red Fort of Agra instead.

Were there any real-life muses who inspired the individual characters of Razia Khan and Prince Arjun?
Razia’s namesake is obviously Razia Sultana, the only female ruler of the Delhi Sultanate. I visited her tomb in Delhi, which was an amazing experience, as it’s quite hard to find and very poorly marked, having no major structures associated with it. However, aside from the name, which I really liked, there isn’t a great deal of similarity between Razia the sultana and Razia the character.

Arjun is kind of a sly reference to the character of Arjun(a) the Archer, from the Mahabharata. In the story, Arjuna spends a year cursed to live as a hijra, so I threw in a slight reference to that in Stealing Thunder as well, though I don’t know if anybody noticed. I thought it was kind of fun to have the male lead be named for a well-known character who spent a year living as a trans woman himself. I don’t know if that necessarily explains why Arjun is such an empathetic character when it comes to Razia, but maybe that informed my thinking a little bit.

Your characters are resplendently dressed and described, to the point where the reader can truly visualize Razia, her comrades and her foes. What was your favorite part of crafting the garb for this book?
The garb was so hard! Fashion changes so much over time, and to make a decision about what people are wearing when you have to consider changes over time and region, and then also practicality, took a ton of work. But I think my favorite part was just looking at all the gorgeous examples that exist both from South Asia in the past and South Asia today. It was an awesome excuse to watch some really fun Bollywood movies, to delve into 16th and 17th century miniature paintings and to go sari shopping with friends. Honestly, research is probably my favorite part about writing, and I love historical costume research, so as tough as it was to feel like I’d done it justice, the whole thing was just a joy.

“I actually have to confess that I’ve always hated dragons in fantasy . . .”

Every time one of the zahhaks stole a scene, I became more curious about your inspiration for these glorious creatures. What’s their backstory? And is their name an intentional homage to the villainous Zahhak of Persian mythology?
Yes, zahhaks, what’s going on with that? Well, honestly it comes down to the fact that there really is no one good translation of the concept of dragon into South Asian culture—or at least, I couldn’t find one that satisfied me. Obviously, dragon could be translated into Urdu as “azhdaha” (which is a Persian loanword). And Zahhak is a villainous character of Persian mythology whose name is sometimes translated as “dragon.” So when I was trying to find a good word to get across the concept of dragon, I really was torn between those two words, and I settled on zahhak as being easier for non-Persian and non-Urdu speakers to read without being distracted by questions of pronunciation.

But their backstory is entirely my own invention. I actually have to confess that I’ve always hated dragons in fantasy, because they’re not aerodynamic, and they don’t behave in ways that make sense in terms of how they’re used militarily in fantasy books. I’ve studied military aviation my whole life, and I love birds—I used to train birds of prey for a living, and I’m familiar with ancient treatises on falconry, including ones from South Asia. So I have long had this knowledge about falconry and this obsession with flight, and I fly airplanes too, so I brought those things together to create a kind of dragon-like creature, but one governed by the actual laws of aerodynamics as much as possible. I researched extinct giant birds and pterosaurs, and I mixed them together with living birds of prey and with my way-too-vast knowledge of military aviation, and I essentially created these biological fighter planes which look like resplendent peacocks. I was so sure that nobody else would like them, but people have really responded positively to them, even though they’re my anti-dragon in a way.

What do you hope readers will discover about the world or themselves after reading your book?
Well, I don’t know that I have enough faith in my own writing to believe that people will discover something life-altering about themselves from reading one of my books. My hope is a bit simpler than that. I just want trans women, especially young trans girls, to read this book and feel seen and represented. I want them to realize that they can be anybody they want to, that they can dream as big as anyone else, that the world is as much their oyster as anyone else’s.

And I realize my readership is largely not going to be trans women, young or old. That’s just a demographic reality. So for the bulk of my readers, especially for my cis readers, I just hope that they come away from this book having our existences demystified a little bit. I think the truth of being a trans girl is profoundly boring and normal. I think if I’ve properly explained what it’s like to be trans to a cis reader, their response is probably going to be something along the lines of, “Oh, is that all there is to it?” And that’s fine with me. Because I think that sense of normalcy, that sense of “Oh you’re just like me,” that’s where acceptance begins.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Stealing Thunder.

What’s next for you and your writing? I’m sure readers would love to know what’s in the pipeline for you, Razia and her chosen family and friends (and zahhaks!).
Well, the sequel draft is done and sitting with my editor right now, who is working on it through this pandemic we’re currently dealing with. I think it’s a really exciting book. It’s got tons more action, tons more drama, and you get to learn about a totally new species of zahhak, as well as to see the ice zahhaks from Stealing Thunder “on camera” for the first time. So that’s going to be super cool, I hope. And, of course, I’m plugging away on another project I can’t really talk about yet, but I can’t wait to share that one with the world too. Other than that, I’m surviving this social isolation as best I can, and I hope everyone reading this are healthy and as happy as can be expected given the circumstances.

Author photo by Spencer Micka.

Many early reviews have compared Alexis Henderson’s debut novel, The Year of the Witching, to other feminist dystopian novels such as The Handmaid’s Tale. And while Henderson’s fundamentalist world of Bethel does invite comparisons to the horrors of Gilead, a more apt parallel may be the 2015 horror film The Witch, in which a young Puritan girl discovers that the only avenue for self-determination in her deeply misogynist and joyless world may be to embrace all that is forbidden, sinful and powerful. We talked to Henderson about how her upbringing in one of America’s most haunted cities shaped her writing and how she crafted Immanuelle Moore’s journey to the dark heart of her society.

What drew you to SFF as an emerging writer? Did you always know that you wanted to write a fantasy novel?
I’ve always loved reading SFF. I think I’m naturally drawn to the way that speculative fiction allows me to escape the conventions of this world and enter another. So it was natural that when it came time to write stories of my own, I gravitated toward fantasy. In a way, I feel like it’s all I’ve ever known. And while I dabble in other genres, fantasy has always been, and likely always will be, a creative touchstone that I return to time and time again.

What has the process of releasing and promoting a book been like during the COVID-19 pandemic?
It’s been surreal, to say the least. I think it’s always awkward to promote yourself, but amid this pandemic, attempts at promotion feel a lot like shouting into the void, and I’m often worried that by asking people to pay attention to my book, I’m drawing their attention away from more important issues. That said, I think there’s something profound and humbling about debuting during such a historically significant time. I know, without a doubt, that I’ll never forget the months leading up to my debut. And I’m immensely grateful that the publication of my book has offered me some light in these increasingly difficult times.

“I was raised on a steady diet of ghost stories and Southern folktales . . .”

As a fellow Southerner, I got the feeling that this book was somehow decidedly Southern even if it wasn’t explicitly set in the South. How has growing up in (and then later settling in) the coastal South affected your writing?
I grew up in one of America’s most haunted cities, Savannah, Georgia. Because of that, I was raised on a steady diet of ghost stories and Southern folktales, and they definitely inspired some of the eerie, gothic themes that are so prevalent in The Year of the Witching. Southern cultural conventions were also a huge source of inspiration behind the book. In the South, religion is more present than it is in other regions. Here, churches serve as more than religious institutions. They are cornerstones of the community and are often integral in shaping the social (and even political) climate of the surrounding areas. I think that social piety directly inspired Bethel, the theocratic settlement where my story takes place.

The motif of dark, earthy blood, whether from the cutting knife or menstruation, feels like it’s everywhere in The Year of the Witching. In what ways do you see blood and magic bound in this world? And is this magic feminine?
I wanted to play with the idea that creation (and the power it affords) demands blood sacrifice. I think that menstruation is symbolic of this, but so are the animal sacrifices Bethelans make in order to win the favor and forgiveness of the Holy Father they worship. So while the magic isn’t inherently feminine, I think the blood sacrifices that are required to wield it can manifest in many different ways—whether that be menstruation, blood spilled on a battlefield or a sigil carved into flesh. In the end, every act of sacrifice can be distilled down to a simple truth: blood buys power.

The figure of Lilith might be familiar to folks who know witchcraft lore. But what about the other witches? Did those come solely from your imagination, or from similar witchy archetypes?
The other witches are inventions of my own twisted imagination. I think I was inspired by some of the conventions of the horror genre (specifically the subgenres of cosmic and body horror). But for the most part, Jael, Mercy and Delilah emerged from the recesses of my mind. I remember, in the early days of drafting The Year of the Witching, being visited by each of them in turn. It was almost as though I had to gain their trust through the writing of the story, and once I did they revealed themselves to me.

The contrast between the earthy, transgressive witchcraft and the strict puritanical society of Bethel that you paint is striking. Can you talk about what inspired the setting for The Year of the Witching?
I always knew that I wanted to write a story about witches and cults. The Year of the Witching, and the setting where the story takes place, was birthed from the marrying of the two. I think that both settings are emblematic of the toxic, binary social and religious structures that are responsible for so much of the dysfunction and darkness of Bethel and the Church that governs it. Ezra’s character represents a different kind of subversion of Bethel’s society than Immanuelle does.

Do you think that in Immanuelle’s absence, Ezra would have continued to rebel, or would he have simply fallen into his role as the next Prophet?
This is a great question and one that I’m still wrestling with. A part of me wants to say that, without Immanuelle’s influence, Ezra would have still found his way to the light. But I do wonder if, without Immanuelle’s prompting, Ezra would have simply followed in the steps of his forefathers. I often ask myself if Ezra’s choice to aid Immanuelle’s quest was a testament to his character or simply another way for him to rebel against the Church, and by extension his father the Prophet. I hope to unpack that question in future works, in the hopes that one day I’ll have a firm answer to it.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of The Year of the Witching.

The Year of the Witching deals not just with witchcraft but also questions of identity and how much the actions of one generation affect the lives of the next. What drew you to explore these themes?
I drew a lot of inspiration from my own life, and my natural fascination with transgenerational trauma and the way sins and vices can be passed down from one generation to the next. I wanted to know whether it was possible for a person to completely defy the circumstances of their birth and, in doing so, free themselves from the ghosts of the past.

Is there more to come from Immanuelle, Ezra and the rest of Bethel?
Yes! I’m writing the (yet untitled) sequel to The Year of the Witching right now!

Author photo by Marissa Siebert of Hazel Eyes Photography

After winning near-universal acclaim for Uprooted and Spinning Silver, two romantic, fairy-tale inspired fantasies, Naomi Novik is turning to the dark side. Her Scholomance series, which begins with A Deadly Education, takes place in a supernatural death trap of a school and follows El, a young woman who seems destined to become an evil sorceress. But if you know Novik, you know it’s all going to be a lot more complicated than that.

I’m so excited to get to talk to you about A Deadly Education! What can readers coming in fresh to your work as well as those who are longtime fans expect for the first installment of this new series?
I think that one consistent element is that my work is always in conversation. In this case, there’s an old folk legend of the Scholomance, a hidden school of dark magic where wizards spent years studying in the dark, without teachers, and when they left, the last graduate’s soul was taken in payment for their education. I read about this legend back when I was about 10 years old, and it’s stuck in my head ever since, and in this book I’ve worked it together with the magical boarding school trope that we all know and love from Harry Potter and A Wizard of Earthsea and the Worst Witch books and so many others.

Like Uprooted and Spinning Silver, there’s also a first-person female narrator. El, the main character of A Deadly Education, is very different from Agnieszka or Miryem; she comes into the story already knowing a lot about magic and the magical world. Also, she’s fundamentally a modern girl who has grown up in our recognizable world despite having magic herself, as opposed to being in a more historical era.

But like Agnieszka and Miryem, she’s also going through the coming-of-age process and grappling with her own power and working out who she is and who she wants to become. She’s also trying to find community and connection.

How does it feel to return to writing a series, rather than standalone fantasy?
I did my best not to return to writing a series! I wanted the story of the Scholomance to be in separate books, because the rhythm of the school year is important to the magic school story. I wanted the power of that rhythm in the narrative—punctuating the end of one year, crossing from one year to another. But I wrote most of the trilogy before I paused to get book one actually ready for publication.

"When you start from a place where your reader has expectations . . . what that gives you as a writer is a way to tap into your reader’s brain."

Your previous books are nestled into these wonderful subgenre niches—alternate history (with dragons!), romantic fantasy and now dark magical schools. Do you feel like you approached them all differently or are the bones of creation largely the same? What appeals to you about setting a story and writing in the dark academia world of the Scholomance?
When you start from a place where your reader has expectations, where your reader knows something—whether that’s because they’ve heard the fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin, or they’ve read a biography of Napoleon, or seen a Harry Potter movie—what that gives you as a writer is a way to tap into your reader’s brain.

What you get from working with source material that’s already in your reader’s head is the combination of the pleasure of a new story, and the pleasure of recognition in a story they’ve seen before. “I know that trope! I’ve seen this before!” And you also get the pleasure of the unexpected. Letting your reader have expectations gives you a more interesting way to move around your reader and with them.

The truth is no story stands on its own. Some stories may be more self-conscious than others about letting you see where they’re coming from, but I'm not, because I’m not worried about it. If I didn’t have something new to say about magical schools, then I wouldn’t be interested enough to write it myself. So I’m not shy about using tropes or other stories as inspiration, or history or any other inspiration.

Your previous books—Uprooted and Spinning Silver—are a bit lighter and more hopeful in terms of magical systems, settings and tone. I had the opposite reaction when reading A Deadly Education. It’s so tense and mysterious! How did you feel about that shift? Is a story with much darker magic elements something you’ve always wanted to do? If so, is this how you always imagined writing it, or did you have a much different idea in mind at the start?
The legend of the Scholomance paints a truly horrible place. The idea that you would spend years locked up in the dark, with answers to your lessons appearing in letters of flame, with no teachers, no contact with the outside world. It’s a horrible idea! Who would do that? What would drive somebody to go into the Scholomance? That question was one part of the root of the idea.

The other part of it was taking the glaring flaws in school safety at Hogwarts a little too seriously. If you look at Hogwarts from the objective standpoint of a parent considering whether this institution is really a good place to send your young child—you might have some questions about the choices that the administration is making. Does the school really need to have a locked chamber with a basilisk in it? Do the staircases really need to fly around to different locations?

The Scholomance series is basically taking that a step further, and acknowledging, “Yes, this school of magic is absolutely horrible. The school is, in fact, deadly.” So you have this terrible school—What makes people go there? What makes them send their children there? How do they survive it? Who comes out of it, and how do they come out of it?

El is biracial—Indian and Welsh—and I’d love to know what sort of research or sensitivity reading you did while writing about her identity and lived experience.
My specific research for any novel is guided by the work itself as it goes. I don’t decide a character's backstory in my head and then dole it out; I find things out about my characters as I write them down. And when I do write a line where a character tells me and the reader something about herself, that's where my research begins, making sure that what I'm saying works and makes sense and is true.

But I don’t mean just fact-checking—it’s not the single line; you have to chase the single line you’ve written and follow where it leads you. Once I spent a week researching whether there were sidewalks in Edinburgh in 1806. It didn’t actually matter, I could have just tweaked the line and avoided the question far more easily, but in chasing that question I learned a lot of things that I didn’t know I needed to know. So I do that and I find and pack the information away in my head, and then it is there and ready to come out when it’s relevant.

For one example with A Deadly Education, early on I wrote a line where El was irritated about having been taught Marathi instead of the more practical Hindi. That’s the moment when I learned her dad was from India and specifically the Mumbai area. And it was clearly right when it came, because the Scholomance was taking shape in my mind by then as a British Empire construct, this sort of Titanic-scale industrial project, and therefore intuitively connected to the massive exploitation of India. At that point I needed to do a chunk of reading and research to understand what that line told me about him and about her.

And then in turn, one of the things I found while doing that research was a terrific online course by HarvardX about Hinduism Through Its Scriptures (I highly recommend, it’s free to audit), and what I learned there informed the backstory of the Golden Stone sutras later on in the book.

I did also ask my publishers to get me a sensitivity reader on this book as well, someone who wouldn't feel inhibited about giving honest feedback because they could stay anonymous and weren't working for me. I found the feedback they got for me really useful. I do think a good general rule for any author is that when you want honest feedback on a topic where people routinely react defensively, you have to go out of your way to make it really safe for someone to give you that feedback.

And you also just have to listen to the feedback that is out there in the world already. It’s there to be read and heard and taken in.

El’s also a bit prickly, which I personally loved. Were there any moments in writing her that surprised you, where a scene took a completely different turn than what you had planned simply by way of staying true to her personality?
El didn’t surprise me quite so much because I felt very clearly from the beginning that she wasn’t being completely honest with herself—that mentally she was working really hard to survive the experience and as part of that to convince herself that it was both survivable and worth surviving.

The prickliness, the dark humor, the sarcasm—that’s how El is surviving, and also how the reader survives, because I don’t actually want to give the reader the direct visceral experience of being in the Scholomance. The Scholomance is not a nice place! But I do want to pull back the curtain every so often; those scenes are the true moments. When those scenes happen, that’s what’s real. They tell you something true about the place and about El.

The side characters surprised me more often, because going in, I didn’t know who all of them were and which ones would be important. Several of them became important over the course of the book. Yi Liu in particular was an interesting surprise for me but I don’t want to spoil why.

I always let the characters lead me. So I don’t have a preconceived plan for any scene. I start to be able to see what’s going to happen a certain distance ahead, but that’s only because I know that’s where the characters are going.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of A Deadly Education.

There’s a hefty cliffhanger at the end of A Deadly Education and I certainly don’t want to give anything away. But when can we expect to pick back up in the Scholomance and do you have an expected number of books in the series? I’m already clamoring for the next one!
It’s a trilogy. It was supposed to be a duology, and then the first book ended where it ended—unexpectedly—and I realized I had to write three books instead of two. Book three is already under way; book two is basically done.

I feel I should share, in the interest of giving fair disclosure: When I sent book two (The Last Graduate) to my editor, she replied with a subject line of all AAAAAAAAAs that was longer than the width of my (very) large screen. And that’s generally been the reaction of most readers at the end of book two. I’m sorry! I don’t actually mean to torture people!

But that’s where the books needed to end. As a writer, sometimes you write a scene, and there’s the end. It’s done! When that happens, you have to accept it. You can’t fight an ending. When your brain gives you an ending, you have to nurture it and pet it. Like a small, fluffy mouse.

If you weren’t writing fantasy, which other genres would you like to try? Something similar or completely new?
Fiction is a subset of fantasy, as opposed to the other way around. Fantasy is fiction where, as the author, you use your power over the stage your characters are on, the stakes of their situation. I would never give that power up just to be able to say I wasn’t writing fantasy.

I know people think fantasy means there’s got to be elves, magic, dragons, wizards, something, but those are just fantasy genre tropes that people recognize and so when you use them, it gives you those expectations to play with. I do love all those tropes, and I use them freely, but to me the real value of fantasy is that my world and my characters grow together.

I will always try new things, though. A Deadly Education is very different from Uprooted and Spinning Silver, which are in turn quite different from Temeraire. My short stories have been wildly all over the map, and I’ve written hundreds of fan fiction stories that are as well.

My mantra is just that I write what I can write, when I can write it.

Lastly, I always like to ask authors what they’re reading and loving now. What books have really captured your attention lately or are books you're looking forward to?
Lately I can read three pages at a time before I get interrupted, and then another six pages two days later before I get interrupted again. But I am currently reading Beasts Made of Night by Tochi Onyebuchi and really enjoying it even though I’m crawling through it like a small snail. It’s very good and every time I come back it’s still in my head despite the interruptions, so I continue to crawl.

I also recently had the opportunity to read The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab in advance, and it’s really lovely! Faustian bargain stories are often bleak, ticking time bombs of impending doom; without giving away too much, she’s turned it into something very charming, and I think readers will be quite surprised.

Author photo © Beth Gwinn.

Genevieve Gornichec’s debut novel, The Witch’s Heart, was one month in the writing but 10 years in the making.

In the fall of 2011, she needed to write a term paper for a college class on Norse mythology. Her professor said the paper could be about anything . . . except Loki. Luckily, the professor had said something else that drew Gornichec’s attention, about the relationship between female figures in Norse mythology and the concept of fate and death. The comment led her to Loki’s mate, Angrboda, a witch-mother with the gift of prophecy.

Gornichec ended up writing a paper that connected Angrboda to other female figures in the mythology—eventually. “Before that,” the author says from her home in Ohio, “I wrote The Witch’s Heart in three weeks for NaNoWriMo [National Novel Writing Month] in the wee hours of the morning while I should have been working on that paper.”

“In many ways, Loki is the least interesting person in the novel.”

In The Witch’s Heart, Angrboda is trying to build a new identity for herself at the edge of existence after being thrice burned for refusing to give Odin the secrets of the future he desires. But then Loki comes along. Despite her initial mistrust of the trickster god, Angrboda falls in love. The witch raises their three improbable children—the goddess Hel, the Midgard Serpent Jörmungandr and the wolf Fenrir—in her cave in the forest. At first she is safely hidden from Odin and the burden of knowing what fate has in store for her children, but her sheltered life won’t last. She of all people knows that she can’t hide forever. Ragnarök (the apocalyptic end of the world in Norse mythology) is coming, and everyone must play their part.

Like John Gardner’s Grendel or Madeline Miller’s Circe, The Witch’s Heart shifts the focus of a well-known myth to a secondary character with stunning and heartbreaking results. The novel actually started as a “love letter, to Loki, really,” but by the end, Gornichec realized that she’d “really made him suck” and that the story was more of a love letter to “Angrboda . . . and all the other characters.” In many ways, Loki is the least interesting person in the novel. He’s certainly far less interesting than Angrboda, the woman who can see Ragnarök coming but knows she can do nothing to stop it.

After graduating from Ohio State University, Gornichec became involved in Viking Age Living History, a community that re-creates the customs, fighting styles and arts and crafts of Viking life. Her experience with the group helped to root her book in historical reality. Originally, she described Angrboda as wearing heavy, ornate brooches and beads, inspired by the jewelry that archaeologists have found at Viking burial sites. But after struggling to do daily chores around camp in similar clothes, Gornichec knew she needed to simplify the witch’s clothing. Away went the brooches and beads, replaced by a more sensible ensemble.

Gornichec’s command of detail in The Witch’s Heart is immense, pulling readers in and making them examine not just Angrboda’s deepest, most unsettling worries but also the tiniest, most mundane moments of her life. Indeed, some of the most beautiful scenes in the book are the smallest—Loki snoring in bed or Angrboda’s efforts to make her cave more suitable for habitation with help from her huntress friend, Skadi. The grand background of foundational epics such as “Beowulf” is still there, but Gornichec grounds the story in its practicalities.

Because the Norse pantheon can only end with Ragnarök, Gornichec always assumed that she knew exactly how The Witch’s Heart would end. Her editor, Jessica Wade, didn’t quite agree. “She said, ‘I know what you’re trying to do here, and I think that you could craft an ending that’s more satisfying to your readers . . . without compromising the source material.’ ” Gornichec says that her editor’s intervention “single-­handedly saved everyone” from the original ending by encouraging her to build something that is instead more “bittersweet” and “satisfying.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE:
Read our starred review of The Witch's Heart. And if you love audiobooks, check out our review of the audiobook, read by Jayne Entwistle.

Gornichec hopes that readers will walk away from her book wanting to know more, ready to ask and find answers to questions about the more mysterious figures of Norse mythology. “A couple people have asked me if I’m ever going to do a Sigyn companion novel of some sort or if I’m ever going to write her side of the story,” she says, referring to Loki’s Asgardian wife. “And my answer to that is no.” She encourages fans to write that story themselves, to “explore on their own and find their own conclusions.” Because, as she notes, what is The Witch’s Heart but “an alternate universe mythology fan fiction, really?”

Author photo by Daina Faulhaber