Kate Evans

I'm very happy to be here.

Oh, that's a good question.

I guess I'm an outsider here, which is always a good place to start when you're writing fiction, because it enables the reader to kind of jump into the story and see it through the eyes of the protagonist.

So for me, yeah, I'm from the UK.

I've lived in Sweden now full time for a decade, off grid in a cabin in the middle of the forest.

So for me, Sweden is still really exotic.

It's still fascinating.

I'm still...

so bowled over by the winters when it gets down to minus 25 minus 30 celsius i'm still kind of shocked and in awe when a moose tramples through my garden and a lot of my swedish neighbors they're like ah you know this is this is normal life this happens all the time but for me after a decade i'm still overwhelmed by that and i try to inject some of that enthusiasm and sense of wonder

into the Tuva Mudisson books because Tuva, my main character, is also an outsider.

She's a city person from Stockholm.

She's terrified of nature.

And I have done a very dark thing.

I've placed her in the town she would least like to live in in the world, which is this isolated town at the end of the map where there's very few inhabitants.

And if they have bad weather in the winter, the whole town can get cut off.

It's like where I live, but on steroids.

So where I live in Sweden, I have a full day hiking to get out of my forest in any direction.

I don't really have any neighbors.

We have wolves around, but we don't have any bears just where I am.

I'm too far south for that.