Alumni Interview: Kiran Millwood Hargrave

FEATURE When Kiran Millwood Hargrave completed her degree in Education with

English and Drama in 2011, becoming a writer was not on her list of ambitions.

Although she had “always continued to read children’s books” and leapt at the opportunity to study children’s literature at Homerton, she had no intention of writing one herself, and instead contemplated a range of careers, from teaching to law.

THE WOMAN OF WORDS AND STORIES

“ I chose Education with English and Drama for its broad coverage of interests,” she says now. “I did lots of acting and comedy while I was at Cambridge, but I knew I was too thin-skinned to make a career out of it. I thought for a while that I might teach, and I did take a temporary teaching role at The Leys school in Cambridge, but I didn’t have the skill or the skin for that either!”

Planning to undertake a law conversion course, she took a year out after graduation to work on her mental health, following a delayed reaction to a traumatic event in her first year.

“I had started writing some poetry as part of a project run by my Director of Studies, Dr Abigail Rokison, and I continued to write during that year out. I realised that Law was just something I was pursuing because it fitted my skill-set – I had no real passion for it. And meanwhile my partner (now husband) Tom, was making a living as an artist, and was very supportive of me seeing where writing could take me.”

Applying for creative writing courses, Kiran was initially drawn to a poetry course at St Andrews, taught by the poet Don Paterson. “I would have become a totally different person!” she laughs now.

Graduating from Homerton, with Jessica Patterson (BA History, 2007)

Instead, she took a creative writing masters at Oxford which required her to experiment with fiction for the first time. The result was her first novel for children The Girl of Ink and Stars.

“I only wrote it because I had to for the course! I had no idea I was writing a children’s book to start with, and I certainly didn’t have that audience consciously in mind, but it became clear as it went on that that was what it was. Because I wrote it quite naively, I didn’t fixate on it being perfect. I just pushed on through, and learned on the job.”

The Girl of Ink and Stars was published in May 2017 and promptly won both the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and the British Book Awards Children’s Book of the Year.

“It genuinely never occurred to me it would win. I went to the Waterstones Awards ceremony with unbrushed hair, chipped nail varnish and borrowed lipstick, and was so star-struck by the other shortlisted authors that I brought all my books to be signed. When they announced my name I turned to look at my husband and he’d turned away to hide the tear in his eye, at which point I burst into tears too. We got married a few months later, so it was quite an emotional time.”

Instant success, as Kiran is the first to acknowledge, brings both privilege and challenge.

“I’ve been able to afford to write fulltime from the beginning because of the advances, and you can’t overstate the privilege that gives you. But once you’ve had some success you move the goal posts and continue to seek affirmation. I realised that what I had liked about the idea of Law is that you can be objectively good at it. Writing is so subjective, and people’s response to it is so mood based. I’ve been a judge on book awards myself, and a book that I hated on first reading I loved so much when I read it again in a different frame of mind that I fought for it to win. So with that in mind, you can’t attach any self-worth to prizes. All you can control is the writing.” The Girl of Ink and Stars was followed by The Island at the End of Everything, which was shortlisted for the Blue Peter Book Award and the Costa Children’s Book Award. Her third book for children, The Way Past Winter, was the Blackwell’s Children’s Book of the Year in 2018.

In January 2018, Kiran came across a reproduction of an installation by the artist Louise Bourgeois, on the Norwegian island of Vardø, commemorating the 1621 execution of 91 people for witchcraft.

“I looked it up, and all I could find was a couple of paragraphs on Wikipedia about the storm in 1618, in which almost the entire male population of the island drowned, and the witch trials. There was nothing on the three years in between.”

Haunted by the story, and by the absence of information, Kiran became increasingly convinced that this was the kernel of her next book.

“The structure was so perfect, right down to the fact that the storm happened on Christmas Eve. All my books start with a strong image, and this storm, which came out of nowhere and carried off all the men, was irresistible. I had to write it.”

Her agent having recently returned from maternity leave, they met for lunch and Kiran described the book which was forming in her head. With a pre-existing commitment to write her first work of Young Adult fiction, The Deathless Girls, she mooted the possibility of a novel based on the Vardø

witch trials the following year. Instead, her agent suggested she respond to her passion for the story by writing a first draft in time for the London Book Fair in March, just two months later.

“I wrote all day, and then as my agent was up at night breastfeeding, she would edit overnight, and I’d rewrite the next day. It gave me a breakdown – I wrote two other books that year and it was all a bit much. But I wrote it while it was really all I could think about, and I do think that it’s the best version it could be.”

The resulting novel, The Mercies, was the subject of a 13-way bidding war and described as “unquestionably the book of the 2018 Book Fair” by the Bookseller magazine. Telling the story of how the women of Vardø responded to the loss of their men, and were punished for their burgeoning independence with accusations of witchcraft, the book is compelling, sensuous and visceral. Kiran’s identification with the women, and fury at their treatment, shines through in her commitment to making their lives real, four centuries on.

“I visited the island twice, once on my own in summer and once with my husband in winter. In winter, which is when the women would have been ‘ducked’, to see whether they were witches, you would have had to break the sea ice. It was so cold that when Tom took his gloves off to take a photo, he couldn’t get them back on again. It made me so angry. I think all modern women feel some fascination with the women of the past who were accused of witchcraft just for displaying some degree of agency in their own lives. I’d always been interested in it. But this story found me at a time when it felt particularly pertinent, and I just wrote it in a frenzy.”

The Mercies was described as “among the best novels I’ve read in years” by the New York Times reviewer, and spent several weeks on The Times Bestseller list. 2020 had a packed schedule of literary festivals, speaking engagements and an international tour. Instead, Kiran has spent the spring and summer at home in Oxford with her husband and cat, walking by the river and conducting interviews via Zoom.

“It’s disappointing, of course – it would have been my first international tour and it’s hard to put all of that on hold. I’m very grateful for the technology which means most of it can still happen in some form – I’ve just done an interview for an Italian literary festival. I feel so sorry for debut authors, with all the bookshops closed and publicity events not happening. Everyone needs people to champion them at the beginning, and we all owe our careers to booksellers spreading the word. I’ve been very lucky.”

The Stielnest Memorial by Louise Bourgeois and Peter Zumthor