JM MIRO

Why the award-winning Canadian writer has turned to fantasy

- Jonathan Wright

BIODATA

From Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

Greatest Hits Miro has written three novels as Steven Price: Into That Darkness (2011), By Gaslight (2016) and Lampedusa (2019). He's also won two major awards for his poetry.

Random Fact Miro's great-grandfather, AE Price, started a locksmith business on settling in Vancouver. Today, Price's Alarms is Canada's oldest private security firm.

HOW DO YOU PICK BETWEEN IDEAS, DECIDE which project is worth investing time in? JM H Miro (aka Steven Price) can remember precisely how his Talents Series made its way to the top of the to-do list. He'd just arrived home and his wife, Washington Black novelist Esi Edugyan, was in the kitchen. "I said, 'What about this for a book? Children with superpowers in Victorian London.' She stopped what she was doing, looked at me and said, "There, you have to write that one."

Be grateful for Edugyan's enthusiasm, because the first book in the trilogy, Ordinary Monsters, is fabulous. Here is a dark, twisting and compelling fantasy that combines a central idea in the X-Men comics, the ostracisation of youngsters who have eldritch abilities, with a fog-shrouded eeriness recalling the work of Charles Dickens. Yet these "Talents", gathered together at the Cairndale Institute outside Edinburgh, may be the world's best, even only hope.

DIFFERENT STROKES