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I think (or hope) that the title Bog Queen is doing work on a few levels. In the most literal way, it’s letting people know that this book involves a bog and maybe some figure analogous to a queen (the actual woman who ends up buried in the bog isn’t a queen, but she is powerful for her time). I hope it also conjures a mood of eeriness and the supernatural, giving readers a taste of what’s ahead.
The title is also a reference to the Seamus Heaney poem of the same name. It’s actually not my favorite of Heaney’s bog poems (that would be “The Grauballe Man,” from which I took the epigraph for Bog Queen), but the title felt right for my book, and I liked being able to gesture at the long history of...[read on]
The Page 69 Test: The Life and Death of Sophie Stark.
The Page 69 Test: Outlawed.
Q&A with Anna North.
--Marshal Zeringue
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