CREATIVE OUTLET

Her real name is Alexene Farol Follmuth, but most of the world knows her as Olivie Blake, the bestselling author of the fantasy series The Atlas Six, which went viral during the Covid pandemic. We caught up with her before the release of her latest book.

- By Liesl Robertson

SO where does the name 'Olivie' come from? 'I needed something to use when I decided to start writing fan fiction,' she says. 'Olivie Blake was the first name that popped up on a name generator late one night.'

While she is mostly described as a fantasy writer, Olivie branches out into new genres all the time.

'With each book I write, there is more of a question mark,' she says. 'I come from a fantasy background. I am a lover of fantasy but I have literary sensibilities. I like to experiment with form and I'm interested in finding new and interesting ways to tell stories.'

She loves quieter stories too. 'I don't need a lot of plot. I'm totally fine to just watch one character have a very slow breakdown,' she says, laughing. 'I think my stories typically have a speculative bent, but at their core I am writing about people.'

DETOURS

It wasn't a straightforward career path for Alexene (that feels odd, somehow; let's just call her Olivie). 'My mom is from the Philippines, so I was raised with a very immigrant mindset: financial safety as the ultimate goal. I've always been a bookish person, but the aim was to find a major that was interesting to that creative part of my brain but also had a pension and healthcare and all that stuff.'

She studied urban planning before switching to law school. While still in college, she worked for the City of Los Angeles, and then for another city in the San Francisco Bay area, where she's from. She quickly realised she wasn't cut out for urban planning. 'It's very much like the TV show Parks and Rec; you just get tied up in bureaucracy. I talked to someone who had worked on the same freeway extension their entire career, and when they retired it still hadn't happened. For me, that would be devastating.'