Samantha Shannon Quotes
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I was always more interested in my books and my writing than going out. It's OK to say I'm a nerd. That's me.
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I do take this insane pleasure in world-building. I get the world in my head, but I have to make sure everyone else gets it.
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'The Bone Season' is violent. There's sex. My little brother keeps asking to read it, and he's 9, so I'm like, 'No, it's not happening.'
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I am the first one to go to university in my family. I am the first writer as well. My dad is a retired policeman, and my mom works for a glass-processing company. She is health-and-safety manager, and my stepfather is a plumber. I have four half siblings, one from my mom's marriage and three from my dad's marriage, so we are kind of scattered.
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I have always been driven; I've always wanted to be published, and I wanted to make that happen, so I worked very hard. 'Perfectionist' would be a word to describe me.
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I was mostly an indoor girl at university. Where other students did drama or music or sport alongside their degrees, I wrote. I used to work on essays and classwork during the day and 'The Bone Season' in the evenings.
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My English teachers gave me a copy of Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' when I left high school, which has always been very special to me - it was the novel that introduced me to dystopian fiction. I'm also influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens, John Wyndham and Middle English dream-visions.
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I was born in 1991, and 'Harry Potter' came out in '97, so, you know, I was really obsessed. I used to read them in one night.
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I am never not thinking about stories. 'The Bone Season' is 90% of my brain - 10% is interacting with the rest of the world.
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I fell even more deeply in love with Tolkien's legendarium after studying Old English literature at uni, as I got a sense of the historical events and cultures that Tolkien used to create his world. My favourite of his imaginary locations is Lothlorien.
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I wanted to write a sci-fi story that would appeal to young women. Loads of girls like sci-fi, but it's more culturally associated with guys.
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It is a strange world, Oxford - quite claustrophobic. I was often glad I was only there for eight weeks at a time.
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I often look at places and kind of mentally convert them to fantasy versions of themselves.
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I know what I want to achieve in each book and the major points, but I don't plan right down to the chapters. I think that the characters write themselves in some degree.
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I was so sure I wanted to be a novelist. I would spend hours and hours every day writing. Little stories about nothing in particular. I recall one about someone with an illness. But my dedication wasn't really healthy, and it reached the point where I wasn't sleeping. My mum would tell me, 'You need to go outside to get some fresh air.'
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I've never had a supernatural experience. I've been tempted to maybe have a tarot-card reading, but I don't know if I'd necessarily want to know.
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I'm not going to give it the big 'I am' now that I'm a New York Times bestseller.
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Whenever anyone calls me 'The new J..K. Rowling,' I think, 'What's wrong with the old one?'
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I was not a rebellious teenager. I was a sit-in-your-room teenager.
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Writing a novel is like knocking on a door that will never open. You are so desperate to get in, you will say or do anything. You feel: please take my novel.
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I was not really aware of the dystopian genre before I read 'The Handmaid's Tale.' Many poets as well, like John Donne and Emily Dickinson, would be the influences; I specialized in Emily Dickinson at university. Both of those poets have really interesting ways of looking at life and death.
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I was a shy child, and when I was 13, I started wearing braces on my teeth. I used to be acutely self-conscious, and I think writing was a way of withdrawing into my own imagination.
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I was a hacker of sorts. Not a mind 'reader,' exactly; more a mind 'radar,' in tune with the workings of the aether. I could sense the nuances of dreamscapes and rogue spirits. Things outside myself. Things the average voyant wouldn't feel.
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I had lived in that part of London that used to be called Islington since I was eight. I attended a private school for girls, leaving at sixteen to work. That was in the year 2056. AS 127, if you use the Scion calendar.