An Interview with author Karen Swan

I am super excited to welcome Karen Swan to Bookliterati Book Reviews today.  I have been a huge fan of Karen’s book for about six years now and summer holidays and Christmas wouldn’t be the same without her books.

Thank you for joining me on my blog today. Could you start by telling me a bit about yourself?

I’m Karen Swan, former fashion editor turned reluctant novelist who has now somehow written 15 books, mother of three, owner of two dogs and happily living in Sussex.

Your new book is titled the Greek Escape, could you tell me a bit about it?

It’s about a woman working for a luxury concierge company, pandering to the whims of the great and the good – but whilst she makes her clients’ lives perfect, her own is falling apart. She has decamped to New York from London, following the disastrous end of an affair and she’s trying to rebuild her life; she’s got great new friends and a dynamic city to live in; But a tragic accident forces her to swerve lanes again and she finds herself heading up the company’s VIP client list. These really are the big hitters and she feels out of her depth. One client in particular keeps wrong-footing her, not playing by the rules, but just as she thinks she’s getting a handle on him, things take a darker turn. And then her ex turns up…

If you could escape anywhere in the world where would it be?

Norway. I fell in love with the place when I went there to research my next Christmas book. I really want to visit the Lofoten Islands this summer, go wild swimming and have a campfire dinner on the beach.

You are publishing two books a year, do you have to be strict about your writing time?

Yes, incredibly so. I have three children and two different school timetables to work around, plus the usual demands of family life to incorporate – shopping, cooking, ironing, walking the dogs, all the mundane stuff – so I spend quite a lot of time trying to push down the panic and stay calm. I stay on top of it, just, but I can’t afford to let my word count slip or I won’t sleep at night. Writers Block is a luxury I can’t afford.

Do you have a particular place you write in, or are you able to write anywhere?

Anywhere. I quite often do my edits in the car or at a table in the local leisure centre whilst my daughter’s at her dance classes. I have a beautiful study which I love – it feels really tranquil and cocooning- but I get pushed out whenever one of my boys has exams so I spend as much time writing at the kitchen table as there. I can’t afford to be fussy.

When did you realise you wanted to be a writer?

I was told by everyone all my life – parents, teachers, friends – that I would be a writer but that actually just really annoyed me; I felt like a foregone conclusion. I worked in magazine publishing for ten years but once my eldest was born I knew I didn’t want to go back to that environment. I wanted the freedom of working from home, no office politics…I had written a non-fiction pregnancy book with my obstetrician and the literary agent for that strongly pushed me to give fiction a go. I was deeply unconvinced it was worth the bother but I one day found myself at a loose end, so opened up my laptop and wrote a scene. It was mainly dialogue but just through that process alone, I suddenly realized I’d been telling stories in my head all my life and that this was what I was supposed to do. It felt as natural as breathing.

What books did you enjoy reading as a child?

Mainly animal books; I was convinced I would grow up to be a vet so I loved The Incredible Journey, Tarka the Otter and so forth. In my tweenie years, I loved the American Sweet Valley High series. As a spotty, braced-up shy girl at an all-girls’ school, the concept of these cheerleading twins at an American High School completely captured my imagination.

Where did you get your inspiration for your characters from?

I always start with a name and career for my characters and both of those elements somehow ‘suggest’ the characters to me. If one element is off, I can’t ‘see’ them but when it’s right, they appear fully-formed. There’s a strange alchemy to it but I’ve learnt to trust the process and not try too hard to dictate how I think they should be. These are just kicking off points anyway, as after a certain point, they’re so fleshed out and real in my mind, momentum takes over.

Christmas is not Christmas from me without one of your books, are you releasing a new book this Christmas?

Thank you! This year’s offering is called The Christmas Lights and is about a young couple, Bo and Zac; they’re social media Influencers, travelling the world together and living a ‘raw’, wild existence. They book to spend Christmas in the Norwegian fjords and end up staying in a tiny, incredibly basic shelf farm, owned by Anders, a local tour guide and his rather intimidating grandmother. They have to chop their own logs, pour baths from a kettle…It should all make for a cosy festive set-up, only the picture-perfect life they’re showing off to their millions of followers is diverging from the truth. Bo suspects something is very wrong at the heart of their lives and only Anders will listen…

Do you have a favourite book that you have written? My favourites are Christmas in the Snow and The Paris Secret.

I have to say I’m very proud of both those stories and in fact, for both of them I wrote the first thirds of each at a gallop – I really understood where I was going with them. I have a very soft spot for Christmas at Tiffanys as it was the first book I wrote which really felt like the kind of story I wanted to tell. I also adore The Rome Affair for the really passionate love story in it. But more than any, it’s probably The Perfect Present. The characters in that story were so vivid and flawed and understated. I think of them still.

Do you have much time for reading, and what are you reading now?

Sadly, I really don’t. My great terror is that I’ll inadvertently plagiarise someone by reading them when I’m writing my own story – I absorb tone like a sponge – so I tend to steer clear when I’m hitting word counts. However, given my schedule, that means there’s only about two-three months a year when I’m not actively writing – usually on summer holidays. That’s when I go nuts and hoover up approx. 10 books in a week. I’m currently reading Sarah Morgan’s The Christmas Sisters for review and am enjoying it hugely.

If you could sit down with three authors, dead or alive, who would they be and why?

Jane Austen, because she’s the ultimate feminist in my opinion – way ahead of her time and able to best (for her characters at least) a patriarchy in which women were largely powerless in relationships. John Irving because he’s what I call a true, old-fashioned storyteller – his imagination is so vivid and creative, nothing is off-limits or too bizarre to be real in his worlds. And Kate Atkinson because her mastery of language reads like poetry to me. If I could just find a way in to understand how her mind works and then do it myself…!

What is your favourite book?

A Little Life by Hanya Yanigahara just blew me away. It felt like such a modern classic. It was huge and yet not enough – I desperately wanted it to never end. The emotion coming off the pages was so raw, I almost couldn’t believe they weren’t stained red with blood. I had to sit on my own for an hour after I’d finished it, just to process it all and settle down into being me again.

Without giving too much away, what are you working on at the moment?

I’ve just finished the final edits for The Christmas Lights and am now beginning next summer’s story, The Spanish Promise. It’s set in Madrid and Seville, with a back story rooted in the Spanish Civil War. Civil wars are often considered more brutal than those conducted over international borders and I’m elbow-deep in developing a tragic story in which the greatest treachery and betrayal is committed by those my heroine loves most.

The Greek Escape, Karen Swans’s new book is released on 12 July. You can check out my review on my blog.

I hope you enjoyed learning more about Karen and her writing.  If you haven’t read one of her books I highly recommend them, great stories, memorable characters and beautifully written.