Rebecca Armitage

Rebecca Armitage is an author and journalist, who likes to write about royals.

As a journalist, she has written stories about the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the coronation of King Charles III, the exile of Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan, and the abdication of Denmark’s Queen Margrethe.

As digital editor for the ABC’s International news team, she has covered several US elections and travelled to Israel to cover the war in Gaza.

Armitage lives in Hobart, Tasmania, with her husband and a poorly behaved German Shorthaired Pointer named Chino. The Heir Apparent is her first novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The title, The Heir Apparent, tells you a lot about what you can expect to find within these pages, but it's also deliberately confusing because female heirs to the British throne are almost never called called 'the heir apparent'. Instead, they're called 'the heir presumptive'. To be the heir apparent means that the crown belongs to you. No one will ever have a better claim to the throne than you. It's almost always a phrase used in reference to men. But to be 'heir presumptive' means you're a woman who has made it to the head of the line because there are no men left. The crown always holds out hope that a boy will come along and supersede her - even if it's physically and legally impossible.

The Heir Apparent is about a wayward British princess called Lexi who is estranged from her royal relatives and living in obscurity in Australia. But a skiing accident kills her brother and father, and makes Lexi the future monarch. Her grandmother, the Queen, decides to dispense with tradition and call Lexi 'the heir apparent' because she's tired of royal women being back-up options when there are no men left to reign. She wants Lexi to know that nothing stands between her and the throne - except for Lexi herself, who's not at all sure she wants this responsibility.

What's in a name?

Lexi's full name is Princess Alexandrina. I chose this as a little nod to Queen Victoria, who was born Princess Alexandrina Victoria. When she became queen at 18, she decided to go by her middle name because it was considered much more British than Alexandrina. There are a lot of parallels between Lexi and Queen Victoria. They were both born to be mere decorative accents to their families and were never, ever meant to rule. But the men in their families kept dying or failing to produce sons, and they both kept rising through the line until the crown was theirs for the taking. The key difference between Victoria and my fictional character is that Lexi is scared of the power dangling right in front of her.

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

I think my teenage self would be absolutely thrilled that I grew up to write a book, which was my secret dream. As a kid, being published seemed like something that happened to other people, so I pursued a career in journalism instead. I've always been too practical for my own good. My teenage self was also in a hardcore literary phase, reading Sylvia Plath and long, dense Russian novels for fun, so she might also wonder why we've written about something as frivolous as royalty. But she really needed to loosen up and have a bit more fun, so I'm not too worried about her opinion!

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

I find the beginning and the end very easy. I always know exactly where a character will start and where they will end up. The tricky part for me is what journey they will take to get from Point A to Point B. The middle therefore changes a lot, but the destination almost always stays the same.

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

I am definitely all my characters. The villain of this book, Prince Richard, is a greedy, jealous, scheming social climber who is addicted to attention, luxury and relevance. But we all have that meagre, nasty creature inside us. My main character, Lexi, is brave and smart, she's complicated and makes a lot of mistakes, but is constantly striving to do the right thing. She's who I aspire to be in my best moments. They might be living in palaces, draped in jewels and ermine, but they're human beings and I borrowed heavily from myself in filling out their souls with weaknesses and strengths.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

The news is a big one for me. As a journalist working in international news, I have to keep across every country constantly, so I am immersed in all the dramatic, wonderful, awful, confronting things that are happening on the planet. But now and then, I'll be working on a news article, and I'll think to myself, 'hmm this would actually make a really great novel.' All my ideas are news stories that are planted in my brain like seeds, and eventually they sprout as novel-length stories.

Visit Rebecca Armitage's website.

--Marshal Zeringue