Anna North

Anna North is the author of the instant New York Times bestseller and Reese's Book Club pick Outlawed, America Pacifica, and Lambda Literary Award winner The Life and Death of Sophie Stark. She is a senior correspondent at Vox. She lives in Brooklyn.

North's new novel is Bog Queen.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I think (or hope) that the title Bog Queen is doing work on a few levels. In the most literal way, it’s letting people know that this book involves a bog and maybe some figure analogous to a queen (the actual woman who ends up buried in the bog isn’t a queen, but she is powerful for her time). I hope it also conjures a mood of eeriness and the supernatural, giving readers a taste of what’s ahead.

The title is also a reference to the Seamus Heaney poem of the same name. It’s actually not my favorite of Heaney’s bog poems (that would be “The Grauballe Man,” from which I took the epigraph for Bog Queen), but the title felt right for my book, and I liked being able to gesture at the long history of bog art and bog mythos.

What's in a name?

One of the main characters of Bog Queen, a druid living in Iron Age Britain, goes unnamed throughout the book. I didn’t make this choice consciously at the outset, but the more I wrote, the more I found other characters referring to her by her title or by terms of endearment, rather than her name. And the namelessness stuck.

The other characters in her sections, all living in England in the first century CE, have names I pulled from a wonderful database called Celtic Personal Names of Roman Britain. I find some of these names very beautiful, but I’m not sure any of them would have felt right for the druid. I wanted her to seem very modern in a certain way, and an ancient name would have cut against that. I also think it’s appropriate that, since she is at the center of the mystery of the novel, her name remains mysterious.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

Probably not at all. I took Latin in middle school (Roman influence in Britain is a plot point in the novel) and was interested in ancient history. There’s also a young character in the novel, Ruby, who is very much based on me as a teenager (though she’s much better at Latin). A lot of my high school writing was autobiographical, and I think my teenage self would be glad I found a use for some of that.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I find beginnings much harder than endings. I often have an ending in mind before I start writing, but I typically have to circle around and around, trying different approaches, before I get to a beginning. In the case of Bog Queen, the first draft began with Agnes, a forensic anthropologist called to investigate a body found in a bog in 2018. It was only in the second or even third draft that I decided to start with a totally different point of view: that of the moss that makes up the bog. Luckily, a lot of readers have told me this point of view is their favorite!

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I think many of my characters, especially my main characters, share aspects of my personality. With this book, I’m realizing that my protagonists often have trouble fitting into the social world or feeling at ease with other people. This is definitely a feeling I had a lot as a younger person and still experience sometimes; I think a lot of writers do. I think I keep coming back in my work to the feeling of being a little out of sync with human society, and how people handle and live alongside that feeling.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I have been very deeply influenced throughout my life by sci-fi TV: first Doctor Who and Star Trek, and later The X-Files, Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, and more. Bog Queen was heavily influenced by a series called The Kettering Incident, a sort of sci-fi thriller set in Tasmania. I love stories that imagine other worlds or other ways of seeing our own world, and the sci-fi shows of my childhood remain huge touchstones for me.

Visit Anna North's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Life and Death of Sophie Stark.

The Page 69 Test: Outlawed.

--Marshal Zeringue