To those of you who flounder at your laptops wondering whether your slavish ly crafted pataphor is all for nothing, there remains hope. I sought out Samantha Shannon Jones, our very own English undergrad, who has just been offered a book deal w ith none other than Bloomsbu ry publishers for the first t hree novels of her series, the first titled The Bone Season.
Samantha is an unassuming interviewee. She doesn’t cast herself as the next Rowling or Atwood (both published by the same publishing house as Jones) but rather admits that whilst she ‘always wanted to be a famous author’, she simply finds the whole process ‘exciting’ and hopes that ‘people will love my characters as much as I do.’
Samantha began to write when she was thirteen, ‘little stories and a first novel’ which unfortunately remain unpublished. At Oxford she began work on The Bone Season during her prelims and found the whole process easier than her first attempt because ‘once I had the story in my mind I thought that this was going somewhere, that this would be a story that would work.’
The story is a ‘dystopian urban fantasy’ with ‘elements of the supernatural’ which was inspired by the Salem witch hunts. The protagonist is a clairvoyant, persecuted for her gift. Samantha thinks that it is ‘outside other genres, because it is so many genres mixed together. I hope it will be different and exciting.’
I wonder whether her time at Oxford has proved formative or challenging to her writing and she admits that whilst it has all been a ‘whirlwind’, her studies in Victorian and Middle English literature have been particularly inspiring and have informed her work positively. But she does admit that she has had to ‘sacrifice’ the student social scene to a certain extent in order to foster her talent.
Finally I ask, ‘if you could go on a writer’s retreat with any author alive or dead, who would it be and where would you go?’ Samantha laughs and replies, ‘The Yorkshire moors with Emily Bronte; or a city with Margaret Atwood to get the dystopian perspective on it.’ With that we wrap up: Samantha to tinker with her novels, I to lean head in hands and wonder ‘what have I been doing with my life til now?’
