Authorgraph No.261: Maz Evans

Damian Kelleher talks to Maz Evans about myths and lucky breaks.

Not all children’s writers can expect the kind of success that Maz Evans has enjoyed over the past six years. When Who Let the Gods Out? was first published in 2017, it caused a sensation with its laugh-out loud take on mythological gods supplanted in a modern world. Since then, she’s gone on to sell more than half a million books around the world, and here she is back with a spin-off series that sees the return of some of our old favourites – and some fabulous new mythological baddies to boot. But ask Maz about how it all began and she’ll tell you a tale that’s every bit as extraordinary as the ones she writes.

‘All an accident!’ Maz explains, laughing. ‘A happy accident.’

She’s nursing a cup of hot sweet tea and a chocolate rice cake as she talks about the lucky break that took all of eight years. ‘It was in 2009 when I turned 30 – a very big mistake and I haven’t had a birthday since – and I’d just had my third child in three years. I was a journalist at the time and I went from running around doing reports on the telly and the radio to literally being vomited on the whole day. I was going out of my mind. So I sat down and started writing books. I wrote this book with the incredibly inspiring title ‘Elliot and the Immortals’. I thought it was brilliant and I sent it off to agents and publishers – tumbleweed!’

Maz’s first book was rejected by every publisher and agent she sent it to, and she didn’t take it well. ‘I’d been a writer for years so I was used to rejection, but oh, that one hurt. I knew this book was going to change my life and I could see me on stage at the Hay Festival talking about this book – quite a lofty ambition. Then I went into a massive strop for about five years and didn’t write a word.’

It was only when Maz started taking Story Stew, her creative writing workshops, into schools and the children started to ask her about her own work that she realised she was missing a trick. ‘The kids would say, “well you’re coming to teach us writing. What have you ever written?” And I’d say “nothing”.’

Realising she had, as she calls it, ‘a direct route to market’, Maz rewrote the book, changed the title and commissioned an illustration from Mark Beech (‘for a pack of pork scratchings’). Soon she had sold several thousand copies – and that’s when the agent came knocking on her door. ‘I said, “but you turned it down six years ago!”’

A book deal with Chicken House followed and Who Let the Gods Out? was finally launched ‘on the stage at the Hay Festival, just as I had imagined’.

Nowadays, the publishing programme for Maz is less accidental. She realised with WLTGO, she had benefitted from a happy curriculum coincidence.

‘The original WLTGO series centred on Greek mythology, and Ancient Greece is a core key stage 2 curriculum topic source for schools – bless them! That would have been a brilliant idea if I’d had it. But this time I’ve been slightly more – I don’t like to use the word cynical because that’s not why I’ve done it – but slightly more considered. Schools have said so many times that the ancient Maya is a big topic for KS2 as well, and there are just no books at all. Teachers and librarians for years have asked, “Please, please will you write a book on the Maya?”. It wasn’t a mythology that I knew at all so that was fascinating. Maya mythology is bonkers and glorious.’

In the new series (there will be three books in this sequence) it is not the original stars Elliot and Virgo who take centre stage but their children Vesper, Elliot’s football-loving daughter, and Aster, Virgo’s nerdy and uncoordinated son. Was Maz not tempted simply to return to the further adventures of Elliot and Virgo?

‘I could have done, but I really felt that story was told. There’s nothing worse than stretching material until it gets so thin it snaps. One thing we don’t get to do with the characters we really enjoy in children’s books is get to see the adults they become so I thought that would be quite fun. It’s interesting to see what becomes of those children – after all, we’re all still children, aren’t we?’

Like all of Maz’s work, there’s endless research involved to get the details right and make sure her versions are accurate to the original sources. Kizin, the supervillain of Oh Maya Gods! is strangely reminiscent of a certain ex-President of the USA (‘I couldn’t possibly confirm that!’) and he’s an egotistical maniac surrounded by death and decay, with a disgusting stench following him wherever he goes.

‘Yes, there are some horrible smells in this book but there’s a very good reason for this,’ Maz explains. ‘Kizin is the Maya god of death but his name means ‘fart’ in the original language. It looks like I’m just being an overgrown kid, but there is some mythological basis to what I write! Seriously though, although these stories are made up and have been transmitted orally, I do feel an important ethical responsibility to honour them and respect them. So the next book in this series goes into the Eygptian underworld where it is governed by the Book of the Dead. It’s a book of spells that, depending on how many your family could afford, you were given to navigate Duat, the Egyptian afterlife, And spell 189? It prevents you from eating your own poo and wee. What a gift for a children’s author!’

Of course, like all Maz’s books, comedy is key and what makes the books so popular with her readers.

‘The humour is the stuff that comes most easily to me,’ she admits. ‘Because I’m naturally absurd, I try to find as much in this world as amusing as I can – in most situations you can find the light and that’s the way I process the world. When it comes to talking to children, no one likes messages rammed down their throats; I think people listen better when they’re having a good time. The difficulty with humour, particularly as sensibilities and sensitivities evolve, is making sure that in trying to hit the comedy target your arrow doesn’t graze the wrong people along the way, and that is something I am very mindful of, and something that I haven’t always got right.’

Maz tells me about Sisyphus, one of the characters from WLTGO, who had a pronounced lisp ‘because Sisyphus has 74 ‘s’s in his name, and that was the point of the joke! And I’ve had both sides of it. I’ve had people who get in touch to say, “We’re so happy with the fact that you’re celebrating a lisp in this character”, but I’ve also had people come and say, “This is really challenging because I’ve got a child with a lisp in my class and I don’t know how to approach this”. I would never want anyone to feel “less” because of anything in my book; that is so far away from what I’m trying to do. The point is that if any child reads my books and thinks that Maz Evans is making fun of speech difference, that breaks my heart. I spoke to my publishers who were incredibly supportive and said I wanted to rewrite those bits.’

In the revised editions, the joke is now that Sisyphus repeatedly uses the letter ‘s’ in all the words that he uses so that ‘whatever he says is insanely alliterative. It’s the same joke, but now it doesn’t hurt anybody. I did it a few years back now and just the other day I got my first email saying we have two versions of this character. I don’t agree with virtue signalling – if you do something right, it doesn’t need signalling – but it felt like the right decision.’

Next month marks another milestone for Maz. Her first adult novel, Over My Dead Body, is published by Headline, another idea that she admits dates back to 2009.

‘Here’s the other weird thing; the same year I wrote ‘Elliot and the Immortals’, I wrote a script about a dead woman who solves her own murder, and I’ve come back to it again and again over the years. That’s my adult novel that’s coming out next month with Headline. It’s taken me 12 years with Over My Dead Body but we got there.’

Now she’s entering the world of adult literature, does this mean her younger readers will be missing out? Maz takes a breath and suddenly gets serious.

‘So long as I’m allowed,’ she says. ‘I do worry though; I’m 44 now. I’m not sure we’re going to have the doyens of literature that we have now in the future. As a middle-aged woman I worry how long I’ll have a career in children’s books. I’m not sure we’re nurturing writers in the same way – publishing seems to be so youth-obsessed these days. I know agents who won’t take on writers who are over 40 or 50 because they think we’re not relevant to children any more. I think that’s really sad. But so long as I’m wanted, here I will be.’

Oh Maya Gods! by Maz Evans is published by Chicken House in September.

The four books in the Who Let the Gods Out? series are published by Chicken House, £7.99 pbk.

Damian Kelleher is a writer and journalist specialising in children’s books.