Brought To Book
LAUR ALAM
THE SFX AUTHOR INTERVIEW
The novelist on her co-writing with Elizabeth May
Words by Jonathan Wright //// Portrait by Lawrie Photography
IT ALL BEGAN WITH A DREAM OF TWO friends collaborating to create “Mad Max in space” – an idea shared post-sleep with Laura Lam by her fellow novelist Elizabeth May. Lam’s response was simple:
“Yeah, let’s do it.” So it was that the two began writing a feminist space opera duology: Seven Devils and its sequel Seven Mercies.
“We have a lot of similarities,” says Lam of her co-writer. “We both grew up in California, we both met our significant others online, and we both moved to Scotland in the same week, even though we didn’t know each other. There are all these really interesting parallels.”
There’s another parallel. Neither was sure how Seven Devils would be received. “We weren’t sure if it was going to find a readership,” says Lam. They needn’t have worried. The book made the Sunday Times bestseller list.