Ten Minutes with Sophie Cunningham

Are you a plotter or a pantser?

I’m a bit of both. A plotter and a pantser. I plot, and then the plot doesn’t work out and I end up pantsing it.

 

Do you have any writing rituals?

No. I tend to write obsessively for several weeks and just get behind on all my work. Or then I ignore the whole thing for a while. So the opposite of ritual, really.

 

How do you feel about the book now that it’s out of your hands?

Relieved.

 

What is your number one rule for writing?

I really want to connect with readers. And I want it to feel real. By real I mean sincere or true – I don’t mean that everything that happened in it is true, but I want it to feel real.

 

Do you have a favourite place to write?

In bed. With pillows behind me.

 

Are you reading anything at the moment?

I have just bought Peggy Frew’s Wildlowers, which I have not started yet but am very keen to get to.

THIS DEVASTATING FEVER

By Sophie Cunningham

Alice had not expected to spend most of the twenty-first century writing about Leonard Woolf. When she stood on Morell Bridge watching fireworks explode from the rooftops of Melbourne at the start of a new millennium, she had only two thoughts. One was: the fireworks are better in Sydney. The other was: is Y2K going to be a thing? Y2K was not a thing. But there were worse disasters to come: Environmental collapse. The return of fascism. Wars. A sexual reckoning. A plague.

Uncertain of what to do she picks up an unfinished project and finds herself trapped with the ghosts of writers past. What began as a novel about a member of the Bloomsbury Set, colonial administrator, publisher and husband of one the most famous English writers of the last hundred years becomes something else altogether.