Jane Rogers

Back to life: the novelist talks about recovering from serious illness

- Jonathan Wright

THERE’S A VERY GOOD REASON WHY IT’S taken Jane Rogers so long to complete her second science fiction novel, Body Tourists. “I was extremely ill for a while,” she says, matter of factly. This is an understatement. On 2 January 2014, Rogers suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage, a life-threatening condition related to a brain aneurysm, which left her in a coma.

“I speak to you courtesy of the fact that I have a small piece of platinum in my brain, which has blocked the aneurysm, and now I am completely fine,” she says. “There were about three weeks where I was out of it and my family was told I probably wouldn’t be able to write or speak, so it was extremely horrible for them. For me, it was fine because I didn’t even know.”

Rogers jokes about this as an experience that gave her “no material whatsoever”, unlike those who see lights, feel pain and have “horrible emotions”, but as she well knows, she was lucky. Just 1% of people survive this kind of episode “without harm”. From the off in recovery, she says, she was determined she would get back to work again. “I’ve still got the little bits of writing that I did to see if I could [do it], and they’re very wobbly,” she says.

INHABITING THE YOUNG

What Rogers didn’t think she was up to doing was writing a science fiction novel to follow up The Testament Of Jessie