Special guest Rowan Coleman, bestselling author of Never Tear Us Apart, reveals how a research trip to Malta started with her being ‘a bit grumpy’ but resulted with her making a magical connection with the island…
TRANSCRIPT
MARK: You went to Malta to research this. So what’s your process when you go to a place to research? Do you have like a shopping list of things to do, or do you just step out the hotel and go, right, where do I go now?
ROWAN: I was a bit grumpy about it, actually. Because, believe it or not, because the island itself is… but it’s sort of tied up with my own feelings about my relationship with my father. And so I was like, well, I expect I’m just gonna hate it and it’s going to be rubbish and I won’t like it. But when I turned up, it was the opposite. I did actually feel weirdly, immediately connected to it. And my shopping list is… I don’t really have a specific set of things for this book, because I first visited before I started writing it, really. If I’ve written a book already, like with The Summer of Impossible Things, I knew that I wanted to get to various locations in Brooklyn. But for this book, I was just getting a sense of the island for the first time, and so I just let it lead me. And it’s very small. It’s about the size of the Isle of Wight. And so the first thing that drew me were the ancient temples, and there are many Mesolithic temples on the island that are absolutely magical and fascinating. And that kind of was like my my first step on a very organic journey into putting all the components of the book together.
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