AL Kennedy's latest book, The Little Snake, is a novella written to mark the 75th anniversary of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince.From her Guardian Q&A with Lisa Allardice:
What was it like to return to Saint-Exupéry’s much-loved classic?--Marshal Zeringue
If you read The Little Prince as a grownup it is pretty bloody sad. You think: “Oh shit, it’s about death.” There’s a funny snake and a snake that kills him. So I thought, I’ll do the snake because I quite like snakes.
The Little Snake is incredibly moving, yet joyful. It made me cry. Has it had that effect on other readers?
It does make people cry. It came out in Germany first and 50% of the time, during readings, we’d have to stop because too many people would be crying. It is about the inevitability of losing everything you care about. The rest of it has to be quite joyful otherwise you couldn’t read it. I hope. With some subjects, such as death, you can’t look at it directly, you have to look at it out of the corner of your eye. You have to have a balance, you have to have the salt and the sweet.
Did you intend it to be for both children and adults?
It’s for very young people up to old people. I don’t have any children, but it is all the things I would...[read on]