Alicia from Readings Kids recently had the exciting opportunity to interview YA fantasy superstar Megan Whalen Turner and below is the transcript of what transpired.

Thank you so much for allowing me the opportunity to ask you some questions on behalf of Readings. Before I get into those I just wanted to tell you how much I love your books and how much they have meant to me. I began reading the Queen’s Thief series when I was 14 and read the most recent few books immediately when they came out. Your books were not only very enjoyable to read, but also contributed to sparking an enduring love of classical history. Gen’s story holds a place in my heart and I cannot thank you enough for writing it out for all of us to read.

Alicia, thank you for your kind words. It is such an honor, I mean it, to have readers like you. I am so grateful to those who waited patiently between books and so glad you enjoyed each one enough to wait for the next.

Starting out with a question you probably get a lot, do you have a favourite character?

I 'enjoy' different characters more at different parts of the story, but I don’t think I have a favorite character overall. Someone asked once if I was as cocky as Gen, or as terrifying as Attolia and I said it’s more accurate to say that all my characters are 'aspirational'. I’d love to have Attolia’s fierceness or Gen’s ability to come up with exactly the right scathing comment in the heat of the moment. Most of all, I wish I had Eddis’s equanimity.

Whose story was your favourite to write?

I’m going to say Kamet’s story, in Thick as Thieves. I’ve been influenced by many writers and I owe so much to Diana Wynne Jones and Joan Aiken and Susan Cooper, but when I was writing Thick as Thieves, I really felt the presence of Rosemary Sutcliff with me, as if she and I were in conversation. I wrote Thick as Thieves in response to Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth. I want to believe that she would have approved.

One of the unique things about your series is that pretty much all the books follow a different protagonist. What made you choose to write your series in such an interesting way?

Every time I’ve read your books, The Queen of Attolia has always stood out to me as quite different from the rest. Tonally, it’s a lot darker, and it is also the only book not to really have a ‘main’ perspective but to share the spotlight pretty evenly between Attolia, Eugenides and Eddis. Is there a particular reason for this?

I hope it’s okay if I answer these last two questions together:

A story in my head exists in almost infinite dimensions. Taking that totality and turning it into words that will be read or heard in sequence, one right after another—it’s a little like taking a projection of the Globe in order to make a map of the Earth. Something always gets lost in the process of going from three dimensions to two. A mapmaker has to decide if it matters that Greenland is hugely out of proportion or whether their map should be divided into segments like an orange peel. With each book, I have to choose what way of telling my story will bring as much as possible from my head onto the page.

The Thief was written in Gen’s voice because I was interested in the conventions of first person. I wanted to use the power of those conventions to surprise the reader. But The Queen of Attolia couldn’t continue in Gen’s voice. To experience the story I had in mind, the reader needed to see things Gen couldn’t see, hear things that Gen couldn’t bring himself to say. The reader needed to understand what Gen, himself, didn’t.

The fact that the books stand alone has given me more leeway, I think, to change my means of storytelling from book to book. Together the books build a longer narrative, but each one has a beginning, a middle and (I hope) a satisfying ending.

This series wears many of its historical influences on its sleeve. When writing the series, what were the things you were most influenced by?

I visited Greece for the first time in 1992. Anyone who is familiar with my books can see the influence it has had. Greece is wonderful for many reasons, but most important to me is that it had a landscape that could not conceivably be mistaken for Middle Earth. I have a friend who has a theory that you can only read three books inspired by the myths of the British Isles before they all seem like rather dull iterations of a book you’ve read before. So someone could read three cheesy knock-offs of the Lord of the Rings and then come to Tolkein’s books and think, oh, elves, wizards, been there, done that. I find this prospect horrifying. I never want to be the writer of the book that supplants The Lord of the Rings, no matter how good I think my book is. So, a couple of years after that trip, when I sat down to write my first novel and wanted to describe a world that was immediately, obviously, not the Shire, I thought of Greece.

At the University of Chicago I’d read Plato’s dialogs, Aeschylus’s plays and Thucydides’s The Peloponnesian War. When I visited Greece that first time, I went with twenty pounds of books including, NGL Hammond’s A History of Greece to 322 BC which has more than 600 pages and doesn’t even get to AD. Even though all of these are ancient history, so to speak, and my books weren’t set in that time period, all that reading helped me build the world of the Queen’s Thief.

Similarly, was there anything from your research that you would have liked to include more of but it didn't fit with the narrative?

Oh, holy cow, yes. Sometimes thirty hours of research turns into three sentences and then I decide that even those three sentences have to go.

You wrapped up this series a few years ago now with Return of the Thief. Was it difficult to finish writing a series you had been working on for so long?

It was difficult in the sense that each book was harder to write than the one before, but it wasn’t difficult in the sense of saying goodbye to characters after all these years. It felt wonderful to share with readers the end of the story I had been telling for so long.

Is there anything else currently brewing away in your mind?

Yes! But I’ve gotten in the habit of not talking about what I’m working on. I feel like talking about a project is very like promising it will be available for reading some time soon. I like things to be nearly finished before I start making promises.

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to my questions, it is such an amazing experience to be able to talk to someone whose books have meant so much to me. Good luck with all your future writing endeavours, and I cannot wait to see what you do next!

The books currently available in the Queen's Thief series are:

• The Thief (Queen's Thief, Book 1)
• The Queen of Attolia (Queen's Thief, Book 2)
• The King of Attolia (Queen's Thief, Book 3)

A Conspiracy of Kings (Queen's Thief, Book 4) is due for publication on or around 8th October and can be pre-ordered here.