Kate Forsyth

Oh, Kate, it's such a pleasure.

Oh, look, I was such a big reader as a child.

I used to borrow six books every afternoon from my school library and then I would finish them by the time I went back to school the next day.

The books that I was most drawn to were ones that were full of magic and adventure and books that were set long, long ago and far, far away.

I was really, really drawn to stories of the past and also stories that were full of the marvellous and the wondrous.

Yes, absolutely.

You know, I always think a story should have a little twist of the uncanny about it, a little flavour of this mysterious universe that we live in.

I'm not really a very prosaic person.

I started out by wanting to set a book during the French Revolution and I was looking for somewhere for my heroine to have grown up and to be living.

I knew that she had to live at the country chateau while her father was at the court of Louis XVI in Versailles.

I knew I wanted her to be very alone and to be out in the forests and the fields and the meadows and the gardens.

Originally, I was thinking about the Loire Valley, but it didn't have that otherworldly feeling that I was searching for.

And I went to France with a friend of mine and we traveled to Normandy and to the Loire Valley.

And while I was there, I discovered Brittany, which I'd never been to before.

And Brittany is a Celtic country.

It's deeply, deeply steeped.

in legend and myth, just like, you know, Wales and Cornwall and Scotland and all those beautiful Celtic countries that speak to my own ancestry.

And I began to read up about it.

And the more I read, the more I could see the character of Viviane coming to life in my imagination.

It was the secret key to her soul.