Two years ago Samantha Shannon was a shy 19-year-old intern. 480 pages and a £100,000 advance later, 'The Bone Season' looks set to become a global bestseller and she’s being likened to JK Rowling
Samantha Shannon at home near
Ruislip Photo: THOMAS
KAVANAGH
Two years ago Samantha Shannon, then a 19-year-old undergraduate at Oxford,
was doing an internship at a literary agency in London.
One lunch-time, as she walked around Seven Dials
in Covent Garden, she had an idea for a novel. "I thought about this girl going
to work in Seven Dials, and she just happened to be clairvoyant."
Keen to write her idea down, Shannon looked, with increasing desperation, for
a shop where she could buy a notebook.
"I couldn’t find one anywhere. I was sprinting around all over the place and
eventually I found this really grotty notebook in a Post Office." For what
remained of her lunch-hour she scribbled away, and when she went home that
evening she kept on scribbling well into the night.
By the time she had finished her internship Shannon’s idea had turned into
something big. "I think I knew right away that it wasn’t going to fit into one
book – that there were going to have to be a number of them."
Shannon, now 21, is sitting in her mother and stepfather’s living-room near
Ruislip. Outside the air buzzes with the sound of Flymos and ducks swim by on
the canal at the bottom of the garden.
It’s an almost eerily sedate scene, yet there is nothing remotely sedate about Shannon’s life at the moment.
The idea she had back in 2011 has grown into a 480-page novel, The Bone Season, for which Bloomsbury paid in excess of £100,000.
So far rights to the novel, published in Britain on 20 August, have been sold in 20 countries – and this is just the first in a seven-book series, which should keep her busy until she is well into her thirties.
What’s more, the film rights to The Bone Season have been bought by the actor Andy Serkis’s company, The Imaginarium.
More
READ AN EXTRACT FROM THE BONE SEASON
It’s an almost eerily sedate scene, yet there is nothing remotely sedate about Shannon’s life at the moment.
The idea she had back in 2011 has grown into a 480-page novel, The Bone Season, for which Bloomsbury paid in excess of £100,000.
So far rights to the novel, published in Britain on 20 August, have been sold in 20 countries – and this is just the first in a seven-book series, which should keep her busy until she is well into her thirties.
What’s more, the film rights to The Bone Season have been bought by the actor Andy Serkis’s company, The Imaginarium.
More
READ AN EXTRACT FROM THE BONE SEASON
