Laraine Anne Barker

That's a question I'm often asked, which is why I chose to answer it first. I think it has to be one of the unicorns, Albishadewe or Silvranja, and possibly the latter. But that would mostly be because Silvranja of the Silver Forest was shortlisted for an important New Zealand prize, the Tom Fitzgibbon Memorial Award, in 1998, when a comedy (2MUCH4U) was the winner. Even in 1998 publishers of fiction for young readers preferred comedy to fantasy.

I was born in Auckland (New Zealand) and I clearly remember thinking it an unsuitable place in which to set a story. This was probably partly because all the stories I read came from the other side of the world, which seemed so much more exciting. I think this opinion changed when I read Great Expectations (which you might remember starts off in a cemetery) and realised that the Grafton Cemetery, in central Auckland, could be every bit as spooky as Charles Dickens’s creation. The book I wrote then never saw the light of day (of course) as was the case with others that followed, but I went on to set both The Earthlight trilogy (The Obsidian Quest, Lord of Obsidian and The Third Age of Obsidian) right on my doorstep. The house belonging to Peter’s aunt and uncle, with whom Peter was staying, was the very house in which I lived in 1987 when this series was started. That was also the case in 1992 when I started the Mark Willoughby series. I started Earthlight partly because when I went searching for fantasy books for a fantasy-mad 11-year-old boy I found very little apart from Earthsea and The Dark Is Rising, yet the shelves of books for adults were awash in fantasy titles.

Unfortunately, when I tried to get both series published I came up against editors who insisted fantasy didn’t sell, and as the years passed and Harry Potter came out editors clearly thought I was copying Joanne Rowling, because Mark, “the One Marked by Willow”, gets his “mark” from his enemy, just as Harry Potter does. As I said earlier, the first Mark Willoughby book was started in 1992 and many years were to pass before I heard of Rowling (as Joanne Rowling, not J K Rowling). That was in September 1997, in an announcement that Scholastic's US imprint Arthur Levine had bought Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.