Katherine Arden

The american writer tells us why she’s drawn to eastern fairy tales

- Jonathan Wright

As a child, Katherine Arden had a book of Russian fairy tales. She loved the stories, so much so that when she came to write her first novel, The Bear And The Nightingale, she returned to them for inspiration. “I was really struggling to figure out how to begin my book. I had never written a book before, and finally, lacking better ideas, I decided to take the first chapter of my novel to retell a Russian fairytale,” she says. “I didn’t know where I was going with it or anything, but at least retelling the story would allow me to keep putting words down while I figured out how to tell my story.”

This “accidental plot device” worked so well that not only did the chapter survive “relatively unchanged from first draft to final draft”, but it proved a jumping-off point for her Winter night trilogy, the tale of Vasilisa “Vasya” Petrovna, “the daughter of a minor boyar and a woman of mysterious ancestry, who lives in Muscovy in the 14th century”. It’s a trilogy now complete with of The Winter Of The Witch. So why was the young Arden, raised in Austin and Houston, Texas, “both of which are very hot”, drawn to chilly tales of Russia? One reason may be that in Arden’s estimation, they have better female characters. “[These are] heroines of their stories, sometimes ambiguous, like [supernatural being] Baba Yaga, but always strong, clever, and enterprising, and masters of their own destinies,” she says. “I feel like there are no comparable heroines in western fairy tales.”