We chat with author A.T. Emerald about Under the Iron Sky, which is the first novel in a dark, seductive, and all-consuming trilogy where hope is fickle but the fight is never over.
Hi, A.T.! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hi Nerd Daily, I suppose I’ll start with the basics. My pen name is A. T. Emerald, and I’m a British author from a small town in Nottingham.
Oh, and I wish more than anything that dragons were real.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
I’ve always loved escaping into fantasy worlds for as long as I can remember. As a little girl, I was constantly drawing maps and making- believe creatures, and (very badly) my own characters. When I was a teenager I wanted to be a video game designer, so I used to create entire character sheets and tragic back stories for all these people I’d invented but it always felt like a dream I’d never achieve – until I discovered my love for writing during the pandemic. I started writing as a way to distract myself from all the awful things that seemed to have taken over the world, and I haven’t stopped since.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: Eragon. I remember being immediately drawn to this beautiful blue cover with a dragon on it (because of course the dragon was what caught my eye), and begging my parents to buy it for me.
- A book that made you want to be an author: The Hunger Games. I remember just staring into space when I finished that for the time while I was at university. I’d never been so overcome with so many emotions after reading and I loved the idea of being able to give that same experience to someone else just with words.
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: I finished The Knight and the Moth recently and it’s been on my mind NON STOP since. Rachel Gillig just has this way of making words wrap around your heart and I cannot wait for her to destroy me again and again and again.
Your debut novel, Under the Iron Sky, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Epic. War. Tension. One cliff!!!
What can readers expect?
A lot of tension, a lot of fight scenes (they’re my favourite, I can’t help it), and maybe finding themselves questioning who they can trust.
Where did the inspiration for Under the Iron Sky come from?
I wouldn’t say there was one single inspiration. I knew I wanted to write an epic fantasy about a war between two peoples, but I wasn’t quite sure where to start. I loved sci – fi and fantasy as a child: Star Wars, Comic books, Lord of the rings, and I wanted to write a world that felt just as rich and wonderful as any of these. For a long time I was stuck on the idea that this story could only be one of these two things that I loved so passionately – sci-fi or fantasy, and I couldn’t decide. I rewrote the first four chapters in so many different worlds trying to make this story fit into a specific box I thought it needed to be in. There was a version where everyone had magic, a world with no magic, but no matter what, I always felt like I was depriving one of these people in this world of something. Nothing felt right, and it took me a long time to finally sit down and say, well why do I have to choose? Why can’t this world be made of one race of people who use magic and have swords and ride dragons, and the other be a highly advanced people who use technology and are more sci- fi coded? Once I let myself write the story I wanted rather than what I thought might sell, the process became so much easier.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
Ikarus and Soraya are interesting characters to write because they’re so in their heads. They’re both lethal soldiers and killing machines in their own rights, but their POV’s can be quite heavy to write mentally, so having side characters like Malakai and Golla were brilliant to really ease that balance of pain and love. I like to think of my writing process like I’m a director creating a film. I’m there guiding the characters’ movements and telling them what to say, altering the script, that sort of thing – whereas Malakai for example would just wander onto set some days when I hadn’t planned for him to be there. He’d do what he wanted and I’d just follow him around, writing down what he was doing.
Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?
A big challenge I faced was the creation of the Iron Sky itself. For a while I felt like I had all the pieces of this world, but I was struggling with the Vordellian’s – mainly there power source. That changed when I went for a walk one day in gloomy February 2025. I remember looking up at the sky and it was just endless grey clouds everywhere, no sunlight. I remember feeling quite claustrophobic and just thinking ‘God, this feels like a cage. It feels like an Iron Sky’ – and it was like that light bulb moment you see in cartoons. From that point, I started working backwards, answering questions like, ‘well why is there an iron Sky? Well what if the bad guys put it up’ And from there, Vordell really started to take shape.
Can you share a little teaser for book two in the trilogy?
That’s hard. I don’t want to spoil the ending of book one for anyone, so I’ll just say one word – WIDOW!
This is your debut novel! What was the road to becoming a published author like for you?
Although I’ve been working on this story for what feels like forever, I’ve been extremely lucky and my actual publishing journey didn’t take very long. I started working on this trilogy in early 2024 but I was pregnant at the time so I decided to shelf it to focus on my pregnancy and motherhood. I picked it back up again at the beginning of 2025 as a way to get a piece of old pre-pregnancy self back, and extraordinarily the majority of my deals were in place by the end of the year, meaning I didn’t have to go back to work after my maternity leave and could write full time which has been my dream for years.
What’s next for you?
It’s all steam ahead for book two! There’s so much more lore I want to explore with this world, and I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface with these characters, so I can’t wait to dig deeper and put them through more torment and pain – and adventures of course. But mainly pain.
Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up? Any you’ve read so far this year that you’ve enjoyed?
I love a little bit of everything, really. I’ve had to pause it for the time being while I go back into my writing cave for book 2, but I’ve just started the Red Rising series by Pierce Brown. I’ve got about 2 hours left of the first book and I am completely in awe and terrified of this world.
