Rosie Andrews was shortlisted for the 2022 HWA Debut Crown Award for The Leviathan, a historical mystery with a supernatural element set in 17th-century Norfolk. Rosie spoke to Historia about writing and researching her bestselling debut — and offers tips for new authors.
The HWA Debut Crown celebrates new voices in historical fiction. What does being shortlisted mean for you?
Everything. When I started writing The Leviathan, I knew it was to my own taste but I didn’t think further than (if I was very, very lucky) it being published, so this recognition is both a surprise and an honour. I’m delighted to be in such good company – it’s a wonderful shortlist.
How did the initial idea for The Leviathan come about?
I’m a fan of anything related to myth, magic and the esoteric, and I love history, particularly that of the 16th and 17th centuries. I also enjoy literary allusion (which, of course, John Milton, as a classicist, used to such incredible effect in Paradise Lost, one of the works I was thinking about when I wrote the novel) and the sense of depth it adds to fiction, enabling us to trace ideas down the centuries as they have manifested in different works of art. Add to that an appreciation of cryptozoology and my love of the sea, and I felt I had the ingredients of something – I just had to bring them together into a story.
The Leviathan is set in two periods, the Civil Wars of the 1640s and in 1703. Why did you use a dual timeline?
One thing that resonated with me as I wrote was the idea that our choices, especially the most difficult ones, the ones that keep us awake, sometimes have long lines of consequence ahead of them.
The Leviathan is a novel about (among other things) free will and personal responsibility, so it seemed important that there should be a reckoning for the choices made in the main part of the story, and that is where the dual timeline came in.
Your novel opens with the unsettling words: ‘She is awake.’ Was it hard to maintain a sense of dread throughout the book?
More difficult than I expected! I had to rein in my tendency to be too ‘nice’ and make the book as frightening as I could, remembering that I was writing about very malevolent forces and unpleasant happenings.
I love a ghost or monster story, particularly by writers like Sheridan Le Fanu and MR James, so I had some excellent models to consider when I was trying to create atmosphere that felt oppressive and ‘dreadful’, but not gory or horrifying.
One of the standout features of The Leviathan is the feeling that we’re there in the 17th century with the characters. How did you combine historical authenticity with the story’s supernatural elements?
It was a bit of a tightrope walk. By trying to make the ‘realistic’ parts of the story as authentic as possible, I hoped I could buy enough of the reader’s trust that they would let me run with the ‘fantastical’ parts.
But it’s also the case that the belief landscape of the 17th century (in terms of world topography, religion, myth) would have included such things as witches, demons and monsters as matters of ordinary knowledge (nearly everyone really believed they existed), so the less realistic elements slotted in quite naturally in the end.
Is historical research a pleasure – or a chore?
Both, in different ways. Reading about other times is a pleasure, and I like nothing more than finding out all sorts of details that may or may not be helpful at some point in the future, but sometimes if you are looking for corroboration of a particular detail and can’t find it, or something you find out is inconvenient for your story, it can slow you down. With research, my motto is do it thoroughly and try to wear it lightly.
While researching The Leviathan did you come across anything unexpected?
I knew the historical period relatively well already from my time at university, so a lot of the research was roughly as I expected, but the cryptozoology part led me all over the place – ancient Babylon, Norse myth, the Book of Job, back to John Milton and Paradise Lost. It’s exciting when an idea turns out to be tenacious and widely distributed across cultures, as with the idea of the leviathan.
What was your path to publication?
I started writing about four or five years ago. At first I wrote short stories, and was lucky enough to be shortlisted for a prize and then to have another published in the annual HG Wells competition anthology.
I then decided to write a historical novel, and that turned into writing a second one (writing is a bit addictive). I workshopped that a little bit with a writers’ group, then decided to query. I was lucky enough to get a couple of agent offers.
When I signed with my brilliant agent Sam Copeland, he was very good at managing expectations. You go on submission with your novel but nothing is guaranteed, so when the offer came through from Bloomsbury Raven (I was already smitten with the team by this point) I was delighted. Then came a long period of alternating between happiness and paranoia, when I convinced myself I’d made it all up. But we got there in the end.
Have you got any tips for someone writing their first historical novel?
There’s so much conflicting advice in publishing (the vast majority of it well-meaning), but I try to take mine from people whose work I love. For me, it was also important to think about shelf positioning: who is going to buy this? Where would it sit in a book shop?
Then, with research (always a big part of writing historical fiction) I want my reader to feel like I know the history well enough to know what to make explicit and what to let go unsaid. I have to guard against the temptation to put all my painstaking research into the story when it probably (if I’m strict with myself) doesn’t need to be there.
Will we see a second Rosie Andrews book?
All being well, in 2024. The second novel is a gothic mystery set around 1850, and although the time period and plot are different it explores similar themes of belief, faith and myth to the first. It’s also more obviously a crime novel – there is a murder mystery involved (as there is in The Leviathan) but it’s perhaps brought more to the fore…
The Leviathan by Rosie Andrews was published in hardback on 3 February, 2022, and in paperback on 5 January, 2023.
Rosie was born and grew up in Liverpool, the third of 12 children. She studied History at Cambridge before becoming an English teacher and lives in Hertfordshire with her husband and daughter.
This is the third in our series of interviews with authors of winning and shortlisted authors from the 2022 Crown Awards.
The first was with AJ West, who won the HWA Debut Crown Award for The Spirit Engineer. The second was with Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, whose Metaphysical Animals won the HWA Non-fiction Crown Award.
Images:
- Photo of Rosie Andrews: ©Sally Masson
- Portrait of a Family, Probably that of Richard Streatfeild (detail) by William Dobson, c1645: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection (public domain)
- The Discovery of Witches by Mathew Hopkins: The British Library Board via Mike Goad for Flickr (public domain)
- Sea serpent, detail from Carta Marina by Olaus Magnus, 1539: Wikimedia (public domain)
