LAURA LAM

The novelist on her co-writing with Elizabeth May

- Jonathan Wright

BIODATA

From San Francisco, California

Greatest Hits

Lam’s most recent solo novel Goldilocks (2020) deals with environmental collapse and follows an all-female mission to a new planet. Near-future thriller False Hearts (2016) was a pick for the Radio 2 Book Club.

Random Fact

Lam is a big Robin Hobb fan. “The first time I met her, I cried. Not too much, but I definitely choked up… It was really embarrassing.”

IT ALL BEGAN WITH A DREAM OF TWO friends collaborating to create “Mad Max in space” – an idea shared post-sleep with Laura Lam by her fellow novelist Elizabeth May. Lam’s response was simple: “Yeah, let’s do it.” So it was that the two began writing a feminist space opera duology: Seven Devils and its sequel Seven Mercies.

“We have a lot of similarities,” says Lam of her co-writer. “We both grew up in California, we both met our significant others online, and we both moved to Scotland in the same week, even though we didn’t know each other. There are all these really interesting parallels.”

There’s another parallel. Neither was sure how Seven Devils would be received. “We weren’t sure if it was going to find a readership,” says Lam. They needn’t have worried. The book made the Sunday Times bestseller list.

But why did Seven Devils so connect with readers? One reason is perhaps that the duo’s vision of an off-planet