Deborah Harkness
Deborah Harkness
Deborah Harknessis an American scholar, novelist and wine enthusiast, best known as a historian and the author of the "All Souls" Trilogy which consists of the The New York Times best selling novel A Discovery of Witches and its sequels Shadow of Night and The Book of Life...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
CountryUnited States of America
good magic material since work
I'm a storyteller, and I have really good material to work with: I've been studying magic and the occult since about 1983.
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Magic provides a way of still having room for possibilities, an unlimited sense of what the world offers. Magic is always there when science is found wanting.
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As a historian, I love every little detail, but whole long passages about wood paneling and journeys on horseback and every stop at every inn had to go out the window. I decided the history in the books should be like spice in a soup - a little went a long way. Like cilantro.
appreciation measured popular
The world of scholarship is much more measured in its appreciation and also its criticism than the world of popular literature.
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I teach 18- to 21-year-olds - the 'Harry Potter' generation. They grew up as voracious readers, reading books in this exploding genre. But at some point, I would love for them to give Umberto Eco or A.S. Byatt a try. I hope 'A Discovery of Witches' will serve as a kind of stepping-stone.
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I realised that today we are very much interested in reading about subjects that would have also interested people in the 1500s: ghosts, demons and things that go bump in the night.
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I couldn't resist hiding some historical details and a few clues relevant to the plot and characters of 'A Discovery of Witches' throughout the pages of the novel.
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Cheap wine is defined by its price, and it depends on personal spending limits. So for me, any wine under $10 is cheap.
convoluted maybe midwife series time title
Once upon a time, about 10 years ago, I thought maybe I could write a mystery series about a midwife in Elizabethan England. I had an elaborately convoluted title and an elaborately convoluted plotline, and at that point I got stupendously bored.
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I really love helping students and helping them empathize with people who lived a really long time ago. That's one of the highlights of working in fiction.
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There were no vampires of note in Western literature until about the 18th century. But they tell us where we park our anxieties, whether its over-powerful women, death or damnation. We make our own monsters.
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Films are wonderful but they do fix an identity. I can't read 'Pride and Prejudice' anymore, for instance, without imaging Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy.
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A lot of our assumptions of the world are fairly cynical, fairly negative, and assume the worst. What our reading tastes show - in this rush to fantasy, romance, whatever - is that we actually still want to believe in a world of possibility, in a world of mystery.
amazingly craft either extreme family hair home people slightly straight witches
Witches are the kind of more traditional, home and family, craft people - so they're the ones who are making things; crocheting shawls and things like that. But then they also have that slightly confident, dangerous, edge. I always see them as having very extreme hair, either amazingly beautiful straight hair or kind of wild.