The latest contributor to
Writers Read: Elizabeth Wein, author of
The Winter Prince,
A Coalition of Lions,
The Sunbird,
The Lion Hunter, and the forthcoming
The Empty Kingdom.
Wein, on her work:
I write fiction for teens based on Arthurian legend and early African history. I was intrigued with archaeological and scholarly evidence suggesting there were major events going on in the ancient Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum at just about exactly the same time as the historic Arthur existed, so I've imagined a genial relationship between the two kingdoms. My young hero, Telemakos, is the son of an Ethiopian noblewoman and a British prince.
Part of her Writers Read entry:
I'm in the middle of The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation: Volume 1, The Pox Party (heck of a title!) by M.T. 
Anderson. This is a truly brilliant period crafting of the life of a young slave at the time of the American Revolution. Octavian is raised as a human experiment to try to discover whether blacks are as intelligent as whites (Octavian, it is clear, is considerably more intelligent than most of either race). I'm also in the middle of Corydon and the Island of Monsters by Tobias Druitt — a pen name disguising the mother-son writing team of Michael Dowling and Diane Purkiss. The Corydon books are based on Greek myth, but cast from the point of view of the underdogs — the outcasts, the so-called monsters, sphinx and minotaur and gorgon. I love the way this imaginative twist reframes familiar myth in a dark mirror. [read on]
Visit
Elizabeth Wein's website and
her blog.
Writers Read: Elizabeth Wein.
--Marshal Zeringue
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