Naomi Novik

So learning it with one of the characters is always more fun than having it sort of

spelled out for you in a certain way.

So I would say it is quite different for different books because each book sort of comes out of a place sort of where I am.

I would say A Deadly Education comes from

I would say, obviously, there's the mention of the Scholomance.

The Scholomance is something that I've been kind of carrying around in my head for so long that that's one of those sort of obscure references that just stuck in my own head.

And so, you know, I don't know if I would say that the book was the foundation.

It was sort of that spark.

And then I've spent literally all the intervening time occasionally thinking about the Scholomance and imagining what it might be and imagining characters in the Scholomance, that kind of thing.

Beyond that, obviously, Harry Potter is, I think, clearly, and the Harry Potter, not just Harry Potter on its own, but the Harry Potter fanish community and the body, the large body of Harry Potter fanfic within which I've participated myself.

You know, the creativity, the sort of the luscious of imagination that so many people have brought to it over all the years.

And then I would say on top of that,

There are some other things that are maybe less, less obvious.

I have been recently, you know, when shortly before starting the Scholomance, I've been reading and rereading Ursula Le Guin's short story, Those Who Walk Away from Omelas.

And that story is one that I read many years ago and then came back to relatively recently, in fact, just shortly before she passed away.

I actually was writing fan fiction, sort of involving that story and sort of exploring certain ideas that then I think came into A Deadly Education.

One of the books behind Spinning Silver was a book by the late, wonderful historian Barbara Tuchman, who wrote a book called A Distant Mirror, The Calamitous 13th Century, which was essentially about the Black Death.

And one of the interesting threads in that book for me was what happened to the Western European Jewish communities and how, in fact, that sort of ended up feeding the Eastern European Jewish communities, which I hadn't quite myself registered before then, was the communities in which my father's family lived.

And that, in turn, obviously came into Spinning Silver, along with the Rumpelstiltskin short story.

I would also say, you know, it's not a text.