Karen Maitland travelled and worked in many parts of the United Kingdom before finally settling in the beautiful medieval city of Lincoln. She is the author of The White Room, which won an Author’s Club Best First Novel Award, Company of Liars and The Owl Killers, which were both published to outstanding critical acclaim.

We caught up with her to ask her about her writing life.

Are you a bookgeek?

Fanatically so! The trouble is I can’t bear to part with a single book even when I’ve read it. So I’ve run out of shelf space and books are now piled in tottering towers on the floor. When I’m an old lady they’re eventually going to discover me living in a great labyrinthine whose walls consist of nothing but books, while I scuttle, cackling madly, through the narrow tunnels between the stacks.

What inspired you to start writing? More specifically, what inspired your interest in the Medieval period?

It was two things coming together. I’d gone on tour with a theatre group to write about their experiences. They were playing in remote villages in England which nearly all turned out to be medieval in origin and still had medieval buildings and churches. I began to imagine what it was like to earn your living on the road in the Middle Ages, and the idea for my first medieval thriller Company of Liars was born, in which I pictured a group of travellers fleeing the Black Death as rolled across England.

At much the same time, I began studying medieval paintings and carvings, and was fascinated by the way angels, demons and mythical beasts appeared in scenes of everyday domestic and farming life in their books, churches and even on the walls of their homes. The mythical world and superstition were woven into every aspect of the lives of medieval people from cooking to childbirth, and from waging war to building cathedrals. They saw no diversion between supernatural and the natural, or between magic, religion and science and that makes this period so rich for any writer interested in story-telling.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given (and do you follow it)?

Read as much as you can about the time you’re writing about, fully absorb the period until you think and dream the period, then close the reference books and concentrate on the characters and plot. Although historical fiction readers expect novels to be historically accurate, first and foremost they read fiction because they want a cracking good story. I always try to remember that, especially if I’m tempted to get too carried away with the research.

How do you approach the research for your books?

Much depends on what I need to find out for the particular book, but for The Gallows Curse, I first spent time in the Norfolk locations where the book is set – Norwich, Great Yarmouth and the marshes – trying to find out what those places would have looked like in the Middle Ages. There is a battle between two ships in the novel, but the bay they fought in is now reclaimed farmland, so it was important to get up to high point and look down on it and visualise how it might have appeared then.

In The Gallows Curse, one of my characters, Raffe, was castrated as a child, so I found out as much as I could about how this operation was performed in the Middle Ages, as well reading modern medical research papers on the effects of early castration. This helped me to imagine what this might have done to his personality as well as his physical body shape.

For the sin-eating element in the novel, I had to turn both to folk-lore and to old Ecclesiastical records, giving accounts of individuals who had gone in terror to the Church authorities, convinced that they had been tricked into becoming a sin-eater.

The novel is narrated by a mandrake, a plant regarded as a demi-god since the time of the ancient Egyptians and in the Middle Ages was regarded as the most powerfully dangerous herb in the world. So I spent much time going through old herbals to find out exactly what they believed about this root, which was said to grow only at the foot of the gallows. The more I learned, the more I felt the creature stirring to life inside my head and began hearing its wicked little voice in my ear.

What’s your favourite historical source of all those you have used in researching the books?

I found Dorothy Hartley’s book The Land of England, really useful general background for my novels Company of Liars and The Owl Killers, as it describes, with diagrams, the old ways and tools for surviving on the land. The English Medieval House by Margaret Wood, was brilliant for getting the details of manor house right in The Gallows Curse, and one of my favourite on-line resources is the Gazetteer of Markets and Fairs in England and Wales to 1516, where you can look up the dates that medieval charters were granted to English towns and villages to hold fairs, who they were granted to and the days on which fairs were held in that village.

Which authors do you find most inspiring as a writer?

There are so many writers whose have fired my imagination, but some of my favourites are – Isabel Allende, Margaret Atwood, A.S.Byatt, Angela Carter, Margaret Drabble, Sarah Dunant, Herman Hesse, Stephen Fry, Graham Greene, Toni Morrison, Salmon Rushdie, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Patrick Süskind.

Do you have an audience in mind when writing, or do you just write for yourself?

From the feedback I get from readers, I know there are certain elements they particularly like in my books – a dark plot-line, characters who are on the margins of society and the interweaving of medieval myth and folklore in the books – so I do try to incorporate those elements I know they enjoy. But I also know I have readers ranging from teenagers to those in their nineties and from all walks of life, so it’s impossible for me to imagine a typical reader. The truth is, when I get engrossed in the writing, I find myself writing not for me or for an imaginary audience, but writing for the characters in the novel, telling the story they are demanding to have told about their lives.

Where do you write, and why?

I mostly write on the dinning-room table at home, because my office is now so full of books I can’t work in there. But when I need a really intense time to plot, I rent a tiny two-roomed cottage on the Norfolk Coast, overlooking the salt-marshes. There’s no telephone, email, or mobile reception there. No street lights either, so if you walk to the local village pub at night, you have to take torch to walk round the edge of the marsh.

When I’m there, if I get stuck on a plot element while I’m writing, I just pull on a coat and boots and stride out of the door across the marshes to the beach where the huge rolling waves crash on the shore and the only living things to be seen are the flocks of birds wheeling overhead. By the time I’ve tramped along in the wind and rain for an hour on the beach, the plot has somehow resolved itself in my head.

Tell us the book you most wish you had written.

There are so many books I wish I could have written and the answer to this question probably changes each month as I become utterly enthralled in another author’s book. At the moment it is Honour and the Sword by A.L.Berridge. It’s set in 1636 in France during Thirty Years War. A young lad, André, the only survivor of the massacre of his family, is determined to save his people from the brutal Spanish invaders. What I love about this novel is not just the fast pace, but the fact that the story is told by multiple narrators, each of whom has such a wonderfully unique voice which immediately engages the reader. You can tell the author worked in TV, because of the way the scenes are cut to produce the greatest suspense. It is so sparingly written, but so visual.

Do you have any plans to write about a period other than the Medieval – either historical or contemporary?

Definitely not contemporary. The book I am currently finishing edges into the period of the Inquisition and the Reformation in 1564, but has the same dark and supernatural elements as the novels set in the Middle Ages, because life at that time was again a period of intense physical danger, fear and superstition. The next two novels I’m planning after that are back in the 13th and 14th centuries.

What can you tell us about your next book?

The novel has the working title of The Falcons of Fire and Ice. It’s set in Portugal and Iceland in 1564. The Inquisition was raging in Portugal, and the same time the Reformation was devastating Iceland. In Portugal, the Marranos, the hidden Jews were being arrested, tortured and burned, whilst in Iceland the Catholic families were hiding in fear from the Lutherans. In the novel, the Portuguese daughter of the Royal Falconer travels to Iceland in a desperate bid to capture a pair of gyrfalcons to save the lives of her family, but in Iceland she finds herself caught up in a even more chilling horror than the terror of the Inquisition she’s fleeing.

Bookmark to