I love character and voice and my favourite books have been the ones in which I've become completely absorbed. But people get a bit excited if there's a black person and say, "Oh this is about that thing" when actually it's about expanding the genre of haunted house stories. White is for Witching was my haunted-house/vampire story. No, no! This is a thing people always talk to me about, but with The Icarus Girl, I wanted to write a doppelganger story. I'm very interested in mysticism, I think it's why I stay in Catholicism.Īll your books seem to be about migration and the need to belong. I recently discovered Argentine writer Silvina Ocampo's short story collection, Leopoldina's Dream, there's a lot of time travel in that. But I do tend to feel more connected to dead writers, perhaps because they have finished their work. And Kelly Link – her story The Specialist's Hat is just off-the-chain terrifying. I recently read Hawthorn and Child by Keith Ridgway and that was brilliant. Mr Cogito by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert is one of those books you return to every year. But every now and again, I get blindsided by a writer. Who are your contemporary favourites?Ĭontemporary writers, eh? It feels difficult to find what I need nowadays. Your work has been compared to Edgar Allen Poe and Emily Dickinson ( The Opposite House comes from one of her poems).
She makes it a very tense drama – will she be revealed? – and your stomach just coils up reading it. I didn't research that much, but I do remember being absolutely fascinated by Nella Larsen's 1929 novel, Passing.
It had to be an American story because "passing" is an American phenomenon.ĭid you do much research into black families that managed to pass as white?
And in Snow White that is very explicitly connected with whiteness. I also wanted to look at the aesthetics of beauty – who gets to be deemed the fairest of them all. I also wanted to explore the feminine gaze, and how women handle beauty without it being to do with men, per se.The women all want approval from each other, and are trying to read each other. A lot of terrible things can come out of that disappointment. Every wicked stepmother story is to do with the way women disappoint each other, and encourage each other, across generations. For me Boy, Snow, Bird is is very much a wicked stepmother story.
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