This spring we've heard from Fríða Ísberg, Bronia Flett, Jeremy Wikeley and PR Woods already. But we bring this series to a close with Susanna Clarke and her short story The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City.Clarke tells us that it's a story she's been thinking about for some time."I have never really stopped thinking about Strange and Norrell," she says. "It's a world that keeps summoning me back."In the novel, The Raven King was very young when he first arrived in England, Clarke explains, "and I had an idea that he wasn't too happy. And also that he would be surrounded by politicians."Even though The King of the North is not a fairy himself, she continues, "his fairy upbringing has had a massive influence on him, and he's never really quite at home with human beings. He ends up in this middle space, not quite one thing and not quite another. And that's kind of useful to him, but it's also quite lonely."Clarke remembers learning at school that the Norman conquest was a wonderful thing, but it was actually a massive upheaval."Nobody quite realised that of course it's being conquered by the French," she says. "And that, particularly for the north, was an absolutely traumatic thing."Just as in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Clarke found that exploring the differences between her human characters "made a little space to put the fairies in"."In a fantastical story, you've got to play with things being very fantastical and alien, and also try to make them slightly humdrum, so that they become believable."The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City is full of Clarkean weather, the "thick mist" around Durham, the rain falling across the New Castle on the Tyne in "grey, slanting lines", and the author confesses she feels at home in the rain."If you look at Strange and Norrell," she says, "most of it is set in winter. I think, grudgingly, there are a few chapters set in summer."The rain and wind even seep inside the house in Piranesi, another novel poised like its author between Classicism and the Romantics."I like the formality of 19th-century prose," she says, "but I always want to push it out of a 19th-century shape and do something different with it."Clarke found she was pushed to do something different herself, when her long struggle with chronic fatigue syndrome made her put aside the sequel to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and focus on "things that felt feasible". But she hasn't left it behind."I'm still moving towards it," she says, "and I do hope to have the energy and just the brains to write it. It's far from abandoned. It's absolutely what I want to do with my life."Fatigue and brain fog may make it harder to write, Clarke admits, but they don't bring the creative process to a halt."Stories and fiction don't really come from that place," she declares, "at least they don't in me. They come from my imagination, from my unconscious, and those things aren't ill. They're fine." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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