STEPHEN ARYAN
Meet the writer of a new Persian-inspired fantasy
Words by Jonathan Wright /// Portrait by David James Coxsell
Brought To Book INTERVIEW THE SFX AUTHOR
THE WAY HISTORY IS TOLD IN THE developed world is changing. Whereas prevailing narratives once focused on Europe and its diaspora, more and more often we’re being invited to see the past from other perspectives. This is part of a wider cultural moment, and fantasy fiction – so often associated at its worst with a kind of generic faux medievalism – is all the better for it.
“Reading something like Shelley Parker-Chan’s She Who Became The Sun or Evan Winters’s African-inspired series [The Burning], these are books we’ve just not seen before,” says Stephen Aryan. “It’s totally fresh and readers are a lot more open to it. And they want more stories like that.”
For a writer looking for “a fresh challenge”, here it was. In his new novel The Judas Blossom (book one in series The Nightingale And The Falcon), Aryan has taken inspiration from Persian history. Specifically, the book is set in the 13th century, when Mongol forces commanded by Hulagu Khan, Genghis Khan’s grandson, expanded the already vast Mongol Empire in the south and west – beyond present-day Iran into Iraq and Syria.