An interview with Liz Hyder

Liz Hyder has been named winner of this year’s Nero Children’s Book Award with her mesmerising fantasy adventure The Twelve. Joy Court interviewed Liz about the book for Books for Keeps.

Liz Hyder followed her Branford Boase Award winning debut Bearmouth with two highly successful historical novels for adults, The Gifts and The Illusions; does she know at the start of each novel, who the audience is going to be? Not with Bearmouth, but with The Twelve, her brilliant, Nero winning, second novel for children and young people, she knew immediately that her protagonists were going to be teenage.

It was a holiday in Wales and specifically walking the coastal path to Manorbier, ‘an extraordinary place’, that inspired the novel. ‘It’s got lots of the ingredients of classic children’s books that I rather like. It’s got a ruined castle, a big sweeping beach, a strange little church on top of the hill with this strange white tower.’ She was fascinated by its interesting history too and the way you can see visible layers of history like the cromlech on the headland at Manorbier: ‘It’s as if nothing is in the right place…  like a tuning fork that’s ever so slightly discordant.’ She knew immediately that she was going to have to go back, ‘There’s a story here and I want to find out what it is’. And after all, ‘when you have a dragon on the flag you feel like it’s a place where anything can happen.’

As a reader you are immediately drawn into the strangeness of this location as the young protagonist Kit chases after her reckless little sister Libby, who is heading to Manorbier Church, desperate to test an ancient prophecy about the mysterious white tower and the Winter Solstice at midnight. Kit witnesses Libby’s fall into a void and her complete disappearance from this world, all trace of her removed.  Fortunately for Kit’s sanity, a local boy, called Story, also witnessed Libby’s fall and together they uncover ancient folklore about the mysterious Twelve, guardians of our increasingly damaged world. Liz describes how she wanted the Twelve to be characters ‘that had that rich deep folklore essence to them. Like Herne the Hunter.’ She was desperately trying and failing to find a female equivalent and suddenly realised: ‘I can just make it up!’

Two very strong themes in the story are a respect for nature and for ancient wisdom.  Like Alan Garner she believes that ‘the stories that remain tell us facts that have been forgotten’. We know so much more now but there are still gaps, and the gaps are what is really interesting, because these are the things that you can fill with stories, with your imagination’.  Liz is fascinated by neuroscience and what we are learning about the brain. ‘Basically, our brains are the same. You could pull someone from 5000 years ago to now and they would probably be using an iPad relatively quickly, whereas if you sent us back, we would be dead within the week.’ We have lost so many basic survival skills and, as they time slip into the past, we see the anxiety this causes Kit and Story, as well as the wonder provoked by dark, star-filled skies and the vividly described unspoilt wilderness.  She was keen to avoid any sense of finger-wagging in the book. As Kit says in their defence, ‘I didn’t start the Industrial Revolution’. That might be true, ‘but it’s what you can do now’ that matters. She wanted to leave a message of hope too. ‘Without hope I don’t think you do anything about it, you just despair and then you are inactive.’ Extra resonance is added to the story by being set in 1999, with the Millenium approaching, ‘such a significant milestone’. Liz recalls a documentary she saw, explaining The Star of Bethlehem and evidence to suggestthat it was actually a Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, something that happened at The Millenium too. This was such a potent detail to add richness to the setting.  ‘So, I stole that as well!’

Watching a documentary on the Hubble Telescope led to her discovery of the amazing, yet virtually unknown, Story Musgrave, who basically saved the whole project. ‘I couldn’t believe his name was Story and I thought: I am having that!’ but she had to justify it. So, Story has deliberately chosen his own name in The Twelve and, as a real space obsessive, chose the name of the astronaut, regaling Kit with the tale. Their respective interests form the first bond between them since Kit is also similarly ‘nerdy’ about birds, as is Liz herself.

It was important to Liz that the friendship between Kit and Story would gradually tip into a relationship. They show complete trust and support for each other from the start, and as readers we gradually learn about the bullying shadowing Kit’s life and of Story’s precarious and lonely existence, abandoned by his family. Story’s challenging circumstances grew out of Liz’s admiration for a friend, whose single parent mother walked out on him at 15. Rather than going off the rails, this made him stronger. Quite early on in the writing, Liz realised she wanted there to be ‘an undercurrent – something that was unsettling’ Kit, even though she was far away from it. In her own experience, ‘It is kids like Kit that get bullied – the nerdy ones’. She hopes it is empowering for kids like Kit to realise they can speak up about it and to realise ‘it’s fine just to be you’.  ‘The first time you fall in love is going to be the best time, the most memorable time and the worst time.’ We see Kit emboldened and empowered by the relationship with Story, even though it is snatched away from her.

For Liz the book is ‘infused with an essence of sadness and loss, but also with love, with hope and the power of story.’ She’s conscious too that writers have to be careful ‘what words we use and what words we choose.’  In the book Nia describes ‘the power of words to harm or to heal’ and Liz thinks we should learn lessons from Donald Trump’s ability to tell a more compelling story.  A loss in her own family made her think deeply about the way the story was told, and she completely rewrote the book.  ‘After my dad died, I could see what it needed. You have to make sure the balance is right between what’s in your head and your heart and what’s on the page. Sometimes you think it is there, and it isn’t.’

She is thrilled by the shortlisting of The Twelve, ‘this is the story I wanted to tell and the way I wanted to tell it and that in itself is a real privilege. I am so grateful – that’s enough.’ Although losing her father and her mother’s subsequent ill health has made the past 18 months very hard, it has also been very creative. ‘When reality is a bit rubbish, I just go and live in my head, it’s so much nicer in there’. So, she describes the stories floating around her head, ‘like’ planes waiting to land.’ All of which is exceedingly good news for readers and fans of her exceptional fiction.

Joy Court is a trustee of The United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA), co-founder of All Around Reading and Conference Manager for CILIP Youth Libraries Group. She is a Past Chair of the CILIP Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medals.

The Twelve is published by Pushkin Press, 9781782695370, £14.99 hbk