Educator and writer Shivan Davis talks about his tragic, tender and wholly unforgettable debut novel, On Winter Hill. How would you introduce On Winter Hill to your readers, and what do you hope they will take away from it? I would probably introduce On Winter Hill as a meditation on first love and friendship. I’d describe it as a coming-of-age story grounded in a sense of place. Hopefully readers will find it true to life and enjoy spending time in the company of the main characters. Can you remember what the seed of this was, as a novel? The seed of the novel arrived through a dream. I keep a notebook beside my bed to record particularly vivid or profound dreams and this particular dream ended up being the final chapter of the novel. I hastily wrote down the gist of it and knew almost immediately that I had the essence of a novel in my hands. In a sense it made the writing process of the first draft easier as I knew how the story had to end, I just had to work out a route towards arriving at that destination. What inspired the choice to use an idyllic setting to explore such unsettling themes? I followed the age-old wisdom of “write what you know”. As well as that, I always felt the need for the action of the novel to occur from around May to September. The novel charts the memories of the narrator so it was important that the events I described took place against a familiar backdrop for me to build a world around the characters. The theme of grief pervades the novel. What inspired this decision? Alongside providing a framing device for the novel, I hoped that the theme of grief would intensify the memories of the narrator and explain his decision in the prologue to meditate on this episode of his life. The recollections of the main character Sahil and his first love Elena, their getting to know each other, that initial attraction , the intensity of their conversations, are the mainstay of the novel. How were they to write, and where did these characters come from? The characters in the novel, including the narrator are either semi-autobiographical, literary composites or entirely invented. Sahil is fairly autobiographical although I have deposited parts of myself in a number of the characters, particularly George. I really enjoyed writing the dialogue between Sahil and Elena. I knew from the beginning that I wanted the novel to take place over the course of a single summer which meant that the progression of their relationship had to develop quickly and intensely without straining the reader’s credulity which was tricky. In terms of the source of where they come from, I suppose I took the stuff of life, remolded it and embellished it. Sahil and Elena losing their virginity together plays quite a crucial role, symbolically in the novel. What was your thinking around this and what it means to Sahil? It definitely serves to make their relationship more intimate and comfortable— something reflected in the ease of their dialogue in the subsequent chapters. I think it’s an event that means more to Sahil than Elena. It makes the ending more painful for the narrator and the overarching storyline more meaningful, at least that was my intention. Your work is elegantly and thoughtfully written, so how much time do you spend crafting your sentences, on average and at the most? I learned a lot about the writing process through this novel, in particular just how much of the process boils down to editing and redrafting. ‘On Winter Hill’ went through a number of redrafts and, in terms of crafting sentences, what helped pare the writing down was reading the manuscript aloud, time and time again, and being subsequently directed by the ear, not the eye. Are there writers whom you admire or have influenced your writing? A few novels in particular influenced On Winter Hill, namely ‘The Leopard’, ‘Nevermind’, ‘The Country Girls’, ‘My Antonia’, ‘Old School’, ‘Mayflies’ and ‘Giovanni’s Room’. In terms of my favourite writers, I’d have to name Cormac McCarthy, Edward St Aubyn, Edna O’Brien, Clare Keegan and James Baldwin. On Winter Hill by Shivan Davis is published by Foreshore in March in paperback. ABOUT THE AUTHOR SHIVAN DAVIS is an English novelist and educator. Alongside teaching, he has written on educational issues and has been published in Schools Week and TES. He has appeared on Newsnight and Times Radio and regularly contributed to The Graham Norton Book Club.
English writer and adventurer Emily Chance talks to us about her enthralling novel, Hermes. The book is called Hermes. Perhaps we should start by talking about the origin and the significance of the title. Hermes is the herald of the Gods. He is the protector of human heralds and travellers. The title operates on many levels with several messengers in the different epochs and of course, the sea creatures are sacred in Hermes world. Using the turtles in the story came from my love of Scuba Diving and the more general ecological message but they play back into the legend of Hermes and Hermes is also a trickster which resonates in the narrative on two levels. I wanted to start by asking if you had the title before you started writing this one? I did and what is odd about the choice, like so many elements of the book, is the synchronicity of the story and why it is called Hermes became more persuasive. What is the theme of Hermes? Oh dear, there are so many, but the central one is we make our way into the heavens to a place that has always known humanity; intimately. They already have a view of us. In Hermes, you explore the essence of what it is to be human. Do you think human beings are ready psychologically and socially to be led (by a greater intelligence) away from their “dark ending?” As the years go by, I become more and more certain we are not. I wrote this book in 2022 and the reality of it, the type of person who would sponsor a mission and that would set out for another world, humanity’s inability to speak with a single voice, state-sponsored industrial espionage, has only increased, life is imitating art. Are you gloomy or optimistic about the future in terms of the way we’re learning, or not, from past mistakes? Do you think we’re hardwired to self-destruct? Do you think it’s time to pause? Pause and soon Are there any experiences that shaped or informed the writing of this book? In each epoch, there are particular ones. Living In New Zealand and learning about the culture, inspired me to begin the story in a location on the Northwest Coast of the South Island among ancient man and their beliefs so nobly expressed in the Polynesian Tribal leader Nikau. My love of the history of Anglo-Saxon and Tudor England which I studied at GCSE A levels, a long time ago. Living in Abu Dhabi has made me intimately aware of the vision of the Sheiks which is beginning to emerge in a vision for a Cultural District, where I live, and extraordinary museums like the Louvre Abu Dhabi which is a location in my book. The hard-working ex-pat communities particularly the Indian one, which is reflected in the opening pages of Movement Three with the death of Elizabetha Chandrika’s father who hails from Kerala. The empty quarter of the Liwa Desert where Space City is located. Tell us a little about your writing process. I write very fast, the spine of the stories of my books are written in about six weeks. I do all my research first and then dip into it for clarification as I go through it. Once the spine of the story is written I polish and rewrite and polish endlessly. Hermes’s first draft was finished in six weeks, but I have spent two years bringing it to the standard it is at today. During that period, I use a reading group some of whom do line-by-line analysis others more general feedback and one in particular proofreads. My location is very important. All of my books have been written in Abu Dhabi and the polishing in Lombok and The Forest of Bowland. What characterises all three locations is I have no distractions. When it comes to this sort of writing, who are you influenced by? I am a very cinematic writer, indeed my writing emerged out of frustrations with certain films. Hermes was influenced by 2001 A Space Odyssey. I wanted to have that relationship with an enigmatic intelligence but tell the story in fine historical detail. So, when an author said to me it reminded them of 2001 but goes much further, I was very satisfied. I see my books as page-turners, so my love of early Wilbur Smith is in there or Dan Brown. I love Hardy, Haggard, Rooney, Fleming but I am not sure they get into my books. I think the film Lion In Winter gets into Hermes. A real love of music underscores the pages of the book. How is music important to you? What music meant the most to you growing up? Music is the soundtrack to my life it’s with me all the time. When I sit down for supper when I am sat under the stars, I play music throughout the day at home in Abu Dhabi. It is a constant oral embrace. Growing up I was a post-Beatles fan so all the music which embraced Jazz, Classical Folk was important to me. The band that took me from pop music to Bartok, Sibelius, Stravinsky the Guitar work of Bream and the Choral music of Byrd was Yes, the hugely successful progressive rock band of the seventies. I still love Fairport Convention for their storytelling and English Tradition, that flavour of Englishness fascinates me Can you tell us anything about what’s next for Emily Chance? The follow-through novel to Hermes is written, called Angelia. It needs a little bit of proofing, but it was written in 2023 in response to the excitement of Foreshore agreeing to publish Hermes. Like Hermes, it is prescient, horribly so, written before the October 2023 attack on Israel and its tragic aftermath. I am currently writing “Isosceles.” It was inspired by the opening scene of a movie directed by Ridley Scott in 2012, Prometheus. Hermes by Emily Chance is published by Foreshore in February in paperback.
Duncan Fraser describes the inspiration behind Terrarium Hostel – a story of ordinary lives against a backdrop of cosmic stakes, exploring themes of connection, belonging, and self-discovery. “Ultimately in this book I am concerned with the question: Is it wise to try and communicate with technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilisations?”. Duncan Fraser An odd little incident many years ago provided both my motivation and the germ of the story. I lived in hostels when I was 18. One of my roommates saw a science fiction short story competition advertised in a newspaper. He cut out the entry form and presented it to me saying that I should write a story and send it in. This took me by complete surprise because I had never expressed any interest in science fiction or in writing. He seemed to have an inexplicable confidence that I could do it. I thought it strange for him to think of me like that because at the time I would never have passed for an artist or an intellectual or even as someone vaguely intelligent. A few years later I did have an intellectual awakening and I did start writing but I wasn’t interested in science fiction. However, as the decades passed, I remembered the incident and felt a nagging compulsion to accept what I began to think of as my inescapable fate. And so, about forty years later, I started to contemplate writing a science fiction story. I have been fascinated by the idea of extraterrestrial civilisations for a long time. In recent years, as I would be standing at a bus stop on my way home from work on wintry evenings, my attention would focus on a particular star in my line of sight. I would begin to daydream about an alien civilisation around that star. It would be at about the same stage of technological development as ourselves, maybe slightly ahead. And rather than weaving a story about its leaders or warriors or astronauts, I imagined what the lives of its ordinary workers might be like. Perhaps workers living in a hostel. A hostel in space. A hostel in a city in space. I later discovered that the star I was focussing on at the bus stop was called Zeta Herculis. Intelligent alien life forms will almost certainly be so dissimilar to us that mutual understanding might be very difficult. In the story that was forming in my mind, I came up with a solution to this problem by introducing the device of an artificially intelligent technology that translates the utterly alien communication into a comprehensible message in our own idiomatic language and with every detail of the alien world given a recognisable correlate in ours. BUY THE BOOK Dollop, a homesick young man, keeps a diary of his life in The Terrarium, a vast space city, as part of a groundbreaking extraterrestrial project. Living in a hostel with two peers, Backlog and Methane, and the enigmatic older man Octave, he feels uncertain about his future and lacks ambition. But after slowly building up his confidence, a shocking truth emerges that compels Dollop to reassess his identity. TERRARIUM HOSTEL is available on back order in paperback £9.50 Add to Cart ABOUT THE AUTHOR DUNCAN FRASER is an award-winning Scottish writer and poet and the author of the sonnet cycle The Campus of Love (Matador, 2018).
