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Authorgraph No.232


own life has taken. The 28-year-old may have achieved plaudits galore for her first two novels, The Girl of Ink and Stars and The Island at the End of Everything, with rights sales enabling her to pursue a career as a full-time novelist straight from university, but she is emphatic that she never intended to be a writer.


‘I


‘It didn’t occur to me,’ she says. ‘This is what’s still so shocking, now that I can’t imagine doing anything else. It just never occurred to me to write books, just like it didn’t occur to me to write poetry until I was, it didn’t occur to me to write a children’s book until I was, didn’t occur to me to write an adult book until I was,’ she marvels.


It’s hard to believe, given the accomplishment of her captivating third novel, The Way Past Winter.


It centres around a quest to


reunite a family and return home – a thread that runs strongly through Millwood Hargrave’s work and life – and a young heroine, Mila, who, she says, is the character most resembling herself that she has yet written.


do like to be surprised. I know that, for me, if I planned, it would just squeeze the life out of twists like that,’ says Kiran Millwood Hargrave. She’s talking about the great “aaaah!” moment towards the end of her latest novel, The Way Past Winter, but she could equally be highlighting the path her


Kiran Millwood Hargrave Interviewed by Michelle Pauli


‘She loves her home, her life, she doesn’t want things to change. And then something monumental happens that means she has to enact change herself,’ Millwood Hargrave explains. ‘It’s Mila who must create the change and that’s something she never thought she would want to do or be capable of doing. There is this real growth into her belief in herself but ultimately she is still a homebody and that is where she sees the end of her journey – returning home.’


The book is set in a forest that is encased in an eternal winter. Snow lies heavy and Mila and her siblings, who are effectively orphaned, are struggling to manage. When Mila’s older brother disappears in the company of sinister men she must make the journey out of the forest and towards the sea, guided by a mysterious mage called Rune. Islands are another key theme for Millwood Hargrave (both her previous books are set on them) and The Way Past Winter contains perhaps the most magical example yet – Thule, a mystical, mythical island that is beyond imagining yet that Mila must imagine in order to find it and discover its terrible secret.


It’s a tale that longs to be read aloud around a fire on a dark, wintry night and, indeed, was almost designed to be so. ‘My mother is half Indian and grew up there and gave me a love of myths and oral traditions. I always say that my stories are best read out loud because the way I write them is I tell them to myself in my head and write them as I go. When I’ve finished my first draft I will make my husband read it to me. It’s the best way to hear mistakes and the best way to be told a story,’ asserts Millwood Hargrave.


6 Books for Keeps No.232 September 2018


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