A Hunger of Thorns
In which I tell you a bit about my next book
So we’re back in lockdown again, here in Vic. And our friends in Sydney as well. I’m back into my usual lockdown habits - anxiety fuelled online impulse buys, trying to support local businesses as much as possible, and spending the afternoons sitting in bed playing Zelda. Of course it’s just in time for Book Week, which is going to mean a significant and unpleasant financial hit for me and many other authors for young people.
But onto the good news!
Firstly, The Erasure Initiative is shortlisted for a Queensland Literary Award! I’m very honoured to be on a list with so many other great Australian authors.
Secondly, some of you might have seen this little announcement a couple of weeks ago:
A Hunger of Thorns will be my next YA book, and my first fantasy YA!
I have wanted to be a fantasy author for my whole life, and I genuinely don’t know why it took so long to get here. But I’m glad I waited in some ways, because I’ve had a lot of practice and… well, I love this story. I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written.
This book has been a LONG TIME COMING, my friends. So I thought I’d spend the next couple of newsletters talking about how it came to be - because it is not the way I usually write a book (methodical, planned etc).
I started vaguely thinking about this story nearly twenty years ago, when I was living in Tokyo and randomly walked into an art gallery that had an exhibition of Henry Darger’s work. Henry Darger was an outsider artist from Chicago - a loner and an outcast, growing up in an orphanage and having no close friends or family, working as a janitor and living in a tiny apartment. Eventually Henry grew old and sick, and was moved into a nursing home. Henry instructed the landlord to throw away everything in the apartment. The landlord went up there and found… a lot. Henry was a hoarder, keeping towering stacks of newspapers and bizarre collections of bits of string, rubber bands, odd shoes etc. But the most extraordinary thing was Henry’s art.
Henry wrote a 15,145 page, single-spaced fantasy novel called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. It is illustrated with hundreds of drawings and paintings. The novel is fairly impenetrable - eccentric and strange but also full of powerful imagery that is beautiful and violent and utterly unique.
In the most fortunate of coincidences, Henry’s landlord was himself a photographic artist, and recognised Henry’s work as being special. Literally nobody had known that Henry made art. I find the whole story of Henry’s life and art totally fascinating and utterly heartbreaking. Since I first became aware of it, I wanted to write a novel inspired by it.
A Hunger of Thorns is not about Henry Darger. For a while it was, back when it was called The Wild Kindness, when I first started working on it as part of my Children’s Literature Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria in 2017. There was a character in the book called Henry who had written a strange story that had somehow become real.
Writing this book has been about falling in love with certain ideas, and then parting ways with them. It has been a real journey of self-discovery for me, in ways I didn’t expect. I ended up removing the Henry character, for a few different reasons. The main one is that the story grew organically in a way where Henry didn’t seem to fit any more. The other reasons are more complex. The more I researched, the more I became convinced that Henry Darger was a trans woman who didn’t have the vocabulary to self-identify in that way. After talking to some trans friends and colleagues, I decided that Henry’s story was not mine to tell. But that original story still flavours the book that exists now - I hope some I’ve been able to incorporate some of Henry’s strangeness and eccentricity.
Henry Darger’s novel was all about lost girls - and I came to believe that Henry was a lost girl too. A Hunger of Thorns is still about lost girls, but I had a few more detours to make before I found the final story. I’ll tell you about those in my next newsletter.
Read
I have the world’s tallest TBR featuring some amazing new #LoveOzYA novels. But I’m craving comfort right now, so I’m reading Diana Wynne Jones’ Dalemark Quartet.
Watch
Is everyone watching #LoveOzYA superstar Wai Chim on Australian Survivor? As a giant fan of both Wai AND Survivor, this is a dream come true for me. Also Survivor in the outback is BRUTAL. Makes all the tropical island seasons look like a relaxing holiday (remember holidays, you guys?).
Make
I made a nice hat. And this lamb shank massaman curry.
Listen
I’m listening to Toxic: The Britney Spears Story which is fascinating and shocking. Appalling that any human can be treated in that way.
Lili Wilkinson is the author of sixteen books, including Green Valentine, The Boundless Sublime and After the Lights Go Out. She established insideadog.com.au and the Inky Awards at the Centre for Youth Literature, State Library of Victoria. Lili has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne, and now spends most of her time reading and writing books for teenagers. Her latest books are The Erasure Initiative and How To Make A Pet Monster: Flummox.
Find her on Twitter, Instagram and at liliwilkinson.com