Interview with Eugénie Szwalek

Khayrun Gure: What authors did you dislike at first but grew into?

Eugénie Szwalek: I honestly can’t think of anyone because I’m a very slow reader, so if I don’t vibe with something, I don’t really have time to keep reading it. Especially when there’s so much good stuff out there.

KG: Where did your idea come from? What was your inspiration when writing your story?

ES: I have a manuscript for a much longer work, a fantasy story that’s 150,000 words long, and while writing that, I was trying to find a more interesting way to describe the character's going still because shocking news got revealed. Then I accidentally ended up coming up with a story about stone people in a desert. So I wrote a side story that happened 400 years before the main story of the book, which is the story of how those people got turned into stone in the desert, and this is an excerpt from that story.

KG: Why did you think it is important to write in this genre?

ES: Life is supposed to be fun, interesting, and exciting, and I think that things like sci-fi and fantasy do that. Literary and serious work are definitely important and have their place, but I also think that stuff that just exists to be enjoyed is just as important, and it deserves to be created with the same amount of care.

KG: What’s your favourite under-appreciated novel?

ES: The Lies of Locke Lamora. It's a fantasy novel about a group of con artists. It has found family and it's very chaotic and broke my heart. But it was really good, and the world-building in it was amazing and so was the writing. I don’t see it come up often, so that’s definitely one of them. Also, just comics and graphic novels in general are underappreciated. As a genre, they're often not considered as literary or as important because they have doodles in them, which is dumb because telling a story on a visual and writing level is extremely complicated and takes a lot of skill.