Star interview: Eowyn Ivey
Fairytale BEGINNINGS
Magic realism and the harsh reality of life in a land of extremes play equal parts in shaping journalist turned Pulitzer-nominated novelist Eoywn Ivey’s fiction, she tells Tina Jackson
Eowyn Ivey’s 2012 debut The Snow Child, a haunting, magical retelling of a Russian fairy tale transposed to her native Alaska in the 1920s, made her an international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist. Four years later, its follow-up, To the Bright Edge of the World, is one of the year’s most anticipated novels.
‘It’s a little bit intimidating,’ Eowyn confesses. The former journalist and bookseller, now a full-time writer, is speaking from her home in southern Alaska – it’s nine in the morning for her, early evening in the UK. 4,000 miles away, her voice is as clear as a bell. ‘With The Snow Child I had no expectations. I feel so blessed that it reached so many readers, but it is a double-edged sword because of the expectation.’
She needn’t worry. To the Bright Edge of the World is a rich, rewarding treasure-box of a book. More ambitious in form than The Snow Child, it uses multiple voices and narratives to tell two adventure stories – a 19th-century expedition into the wild, uncharted northern Alaskan interior by Lieutenant Colonel Allen Forrester and the parallel experiences of his pregnant wife Sophie – and their modern day resonances, told via the correspondence of elderly Walt Forrester and Native Alaskan museum curator Josh Sloan, to whom Walt has sent boxes of papers relating to his great uncle’s expedition.
The Colonel’s exploration was inspired by a real-life expedition into Alaska that took place in 1885. Eowyn has used diaries, letters and reports as narrative devices. ‘I wanted to challenge myself, writing the sequel to The Snow Child, to keep it interesting to me as a writer,’ she says. ‘As I was researching it I was doing what Jake was doing, and going through letters and diaries. I found that sense of discovery so exciting, I wanted the reader to have that sense of opening a box. I did wonder if I could do it – juggle all these voices.’