We chat with author Marianne Gordon about The Gilded Crown, which follows a woman who can bring people back from the dead, and the princess—and only heir to the throne—that she must protect, no matter the cost.
Hi, Marianne! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
I am a dark fantasy writer. I love writing character studies and exploring the most honest results of ‘what if’ scenarios. I’ve worked in publishing most of my career, and I now write full time. I live with my partner and cat in Edinburgh, the town of my birth, and in my spare time I love quilting, watching old Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers films, and motorbiking around the Scottish countryside.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
I have always been a daydreamer, preferring stories to the real world! If there was a mushroom circle I’d step in it deliberately, ‘Oh no a fairy circle, wouldn’t it be terrible if I were to be whisked away to a fairy dance, oh no.’ We used to have beautiful folio editions of the Hans Christian Anderson fairytales and I loved the Edmund Dulac illustrations. I have always been interested in how fairytales encapsulate truths about being alive and being human, and what they can tell us about cultural psyches. It felt only natural to direct my wayward brain towards writing.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: The Song of the Lioness, Tamora Pierce. It was one of the first books I’d ever read with a young woman as a warrior; there’s a tendency in fantasy for women to have the ‘distance’ trope, i.e. they’re healers or magic users, rarely swinging a sword in direct confrontation. It’s a lot more common-place now, fortunately, but when I was a kid this was refreshing.
- The one that made you want to become an author: The Gift, Alison Croggon. The way Croggon writes – musically – made me want to write fantasy with poetry. I come back to her series, the Books of Pellinor, again and again, they’re beautiful.
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke. There’s something so gripping about this book, the concept that fairies are quite alien and have no real comprehension of human thoughts and feelings. The fairy world appears beautiful and rich, but beneath the illusion it’s full of rot and malice, testimony that fairies don’t need riches but enjoy the idea of them.
Your debut novel, The Gilded Crown, is out July 2nd! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Resurrection always has a cost.
What can readers expect?
It’s a dark tale about a young woman, Hellevir, who can enter death and trade parts of her body and soul with the shrouded being who resides there. One day the corpse of a Princess is brought to her, and upon the Queen’s command she brings her back. But once is not enough; the Princess was assassinated, and her killers may strike again, sparking civil war. Hellevir must travel to the capital to remain by her side, and becomes ensnared in a thick web of back-stabbing politics, threats and assassination attempts, all while trying to keep the wayward Princess alive, and to uncover the truth of who the figure of Death really is. Readers can expect raven companions, queer coded romance, and lots of death.
Where did the inspiration for The Gilded Crown come from?
I wrote this book (and book 2, The Antlered King, due next year) during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. I was definitely one of the lucky ones, fortunate enough to have my own space and to be able to work from home, but even so the experience left a mark, as it did on everyone. There was a long stretch of time when staying home and doing nothing became very claustrophobic and I felt like a very useless human being; it is with the benefit of hindsight that I realise this bled a lot into the book. Hellevir starts as a character without much agency, but by virtue of her abilities she becomes anything but useless. I poured a lot of my anxieties into her, through her exploring my desire to be proactive, no matter the cost; like two of my friends, a nurse and a doctor, who sacrificed their safety to help others. The book is in part dedicated to them.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
So many! I really enjoyed writing Farvor and Calgir; I really wanted to write a sweet romance without any of the prejudice you see in a lot of fantasy, but simply just existing as it should be. I feel that treating queer-coded ideas of love as completely standard in fiction is a helpful step in squashing prejudice in the real world.
I also really loved getting into the herblore and learning about weird and wacky olde medieval practices, like using hedgehog grease to cure a sore throat.
This is your debut published novel! What was the road to becoming a published author like for you?
Full of angst! I sent out a bunch of enquiries to agents and was rejected, and only realised after about a month that there was a grammatical error in the very first line of my manuscript. I must have read it about a hundred times, still slipped through. Embarrassing error fixed, it was picked up pretty quickly by Ki Agency, and in those first few days of talking it over with them I was so ecstatic to be starting the journey that you couldn’t have scraped me off the ceiling with a spatula!
The book was picked up by HarperVoyager. I had come from an academic publishing background and assumed I knew how it would work, but the two worlds are as different as chalk and cheese. It was a learning curve, but I was lucky to have an amazing agent willing to go to bat on my behalf. Publishing with HarperVoyager has been a lot of fun, my current editors are a delight.
What’s next for you?
I’m going to keep writing! I have a new title under construction about gods and oceans and revenge, which is nearly a third of the way completed. It’s going to be dark and feral, I’m so excited about it.
The second book of The Raven’s Trade, ‘The Antlered King’, comes out next year, and concludes Hellevir’s story, exploring her relationship with Death and what it means to have so much of her soul tangled up with the Princess’.
Lastly, what books have you enjoyed so far this year and are there any that you can’t wait to get your hands on?
I absolutely adored ‘Meet Me in Another Life’ by Catriona Silvey, a story about two people who meet again and again in different lives. It was heartbreaking, I sobbed. I discovered recently that the narrator for my audiobook, Kristin Atherton, also read Silvey’s, which made me unbelievably happy, and we had a small fan-girl at each other about how amazing the book is.
My TBR tower is teetering, but I’m very excited about ‘Shadowstitch‘ by Cari Thomas, the second in her Threadneedle series. I got sent a copy by accident after a warehouse mixup, and they let me keep it, I love it when the universe sends me the exact book I want to read!
