Brought ToBook
MOIRA BUFFINI
THE SFX AUTHOR INTERVIEW
Late show: the acclaimed dramatist tells us why she’s written a novel
Words by Jonathan Wright /// Portrait by John Biltcliffe
WHEN SHE FIRST SAT DOWN TO WRITE Songlight, her story of a dystopian future where telepaths are feared and hunted, Moira Buffini had little idea she was about to craft her debut novel. A hugely successful dramatist, her initial instinct was to treat the story as an on-spec project for cinema or TV.
“I sat down and started to write the screenplay, and realised almost immediately that I couldn’t, that there was just too much about this world that I didn’t know,” says Buffini. She decided to write “from inside the character” as “a kind of interior monologue” so she could better understand the fictional world she was trying to describe. “Almost by the end of the first page of this, I thought, ‘This is a book.’”