All I Want for Christmas is the latest cosy and escapist festive story from the Sunday Times bestselling author Karen Swan, who lives in the Ashdown Forest.
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00:00Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Ancestors Newspapers. Lovely
00:06to speak again to Karen Swan, who lives in the Ashdown Forest. And Karen, over the years
00:10you've developed, well, a tradition, haven't you, for coming up with Christmas books which
00:15are not wholly about Christmas, but give us a sense of Christmas, don't they, the Christmas
00:19build-up, the Christmas feel. And the latest is All I Want for Christmas. And that's had
00:25such an interesting beginning in your mind, the first germ of the idea for this book.
00:30Yes, it was really interesting, and of course it's proof that stories are everywhere and
00:35inspiration will strike at any time. I was driving along the motorway,
00:41travelling across England, and I was listening to the radio, and they were talking about the
00:45unsealing of some letters by T.S. Eliot, the poet T.S. Eliot, however many years after his
00:53death. And there had been an argument about whether or not the great man had ever used his
00:59own personal life as inspiration for the characters in The Wasteland. And there's been this enormous
01:05academic debate raging about it for all these generations, all these decades. A vast majority
01:12of academics saying absolutely not, he never would do that. And actually then the letters
01:16were unsealed and they were letters to his lover, who he never married and she never married.
01:22He did marry, but she never did. And in fact, it proved that he admitted to her that she was
01:30his muse and his inspiration for these characters in The Wasteland. And it just gave me the idea of
01:36a secret being kept for a very long time and held in an institution like a library is fantastic,
01:44gives a great sense of importance and gravitas, and gives you a sense of scale of someone's life.
01:49And so I started thinking about that. In my mind's eye, I just had this image of two figures
01:56standing outside the library early one morning waiting for the doors to open.
02:02That's fascinating. Is that how most books start? You just have to wander around, drive around in
02:07a receptive state and just assume, just be confident that something will come to you
02:12that will spark your mind. It's amazing how often you will accidentally stumble upon something.
02:18It's always an accident, of course. I mean, you never know what you're looking for until you find
02:23it. And so I knew immediately that that was something I could use. So presumably the trick
02:29is not to go searching. Yeah, you've just, my brain sort of becomes like a scanner. There's a
02:37point where I go into sort of like a lucid, not a dream state, but like my brain is really looking
02:45out. When I'm writing, I'm so focused, I can't think about anything at all other than the world
02:50that I'm writing about. And then I'm not receptive and I don't tend to hear things. But as soon as
02:57I need a story, it's just another, I don't know whether it's a beta wave state, I don't know what
03:04it is, but I'm scanning all the time, looking. And it might be something someone says, you know,
03:12a friend, it might be a story they tell, it's something I read in the paper that I hear on the
03:16radio. But what I have managed to do is train my brain to hold on to that. Invariably, it's only
03:22going to be one thread of a story. You know, you never really get a book fully formed because it
03:28will be made up of multiple elements, you know, to a plot. And somehow this has become all I want
03:35for Christmas. Well, exactly. It becomes a building block. And this one is set in Copenhagen,
03:41isn't it? Yes, I felt it was time to go back and do a beautiful European city because my most recent
03:48books have all been actually quite rural, out in the wild. The Yorkshire Moors last year. And of
03:54course, I've been doing the Wild Isles series set on the Hebridean island of St. Kilda in 1930. So
04:00I've sort of really exposed my readers to quite a lot of sheep and grass. And I felt that we maybe
04:06should have some coffee shops and, you know, some finely tailored clothes and something a
04:11bit more sophisticated. And this is in the Christmas series. And I was saying it's not
04:16specifically wholly about Christmas. So what is the meaning and significance of Christmas in this
04:20particular book? It's really just, it almost is just a backdrop. Christmas is a backdrop as much
04:26as Copenhagen is. So one of the reasons I chose Copenhagen is like a lot of the Northern European
04:31cities, they have lots of Christmas markets. You know, they have a very nice cosmopolitan Christmas
04:39vibe that they actively kindle and nurture. So that's great when you're walking around the city,
04:44there's lights everywhere, there's trees everywhere, there's markets around every corner,
04:49and that feels lovely to move about in. So, you know, obviously, we're moving towards Christmas.
04:56That's a time when invariably, you've got this mass exodus of people to travel to be with their
05:02friends, their families, their loved ones. So it was nice to have that to work towards. But it was,
05:09again, it's just really a backdrop in the way that the city was.
05:13Fantastic. And it's All I Want for Christmas. And it comes out mid-October, doesn't it?
05:18Yes, yes, very soon.
05:21Lovely to speak to you again. And let's speak about the next one. Thanks.
05:24Thanks, Bill.