Interview: Edoardo Albert

I had the pleasure of reading and reviewing author and historian Edoardo Albert’s book, Edwin: High King of Britain, a couple weeks back. Today I am very pleased to invite him to the blog, for a discussion of books, writing, and…pizza?

Hi Edorado, and welcome to The Traveller’s Path. Let’s start by having you tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey as a writer.

My name is Edoardo Albert and, yes, I am a writer. Words are my drug of choice. Those little packets of meaning – squiggles on a page or fleeting movements in the air – that put my mind in yours and yours in mine; that allow me to hear the dead and speak to the future; the everyday miracle that we ignore. It’s a dangerous business, opening up a book and reading the first line – there’s no knowing where you might end up: heaven, hell, a dull Thursday in Croydon or talking to a woman with a fish’s head. Dear reader, beware! You hold in your hands something more dangerous than an unexploded bomb, more skittish than a thoroughbred sea horse, more insidious than the Zika virus. Listen… Can you hear? I’m in your mind now.

Hello…

How did you get interested in writing about this time and place? And in particular, what was it about Edwin that prompted you to write about him? 

Taking the B1340 road north out of Seahouses. That’s what set me off, eventually, writing about 7th-century Northumbria. When you take this road, you see up ahead, squatting on a great upthrust of the Whin Sill where earth and sea and sky meet, this: Bamburgh Castle.

This I later learned to be the ancient seat of the Idings, the kings of Northumbria; the stronghold of the earls of Northumberland, who held off the Viking kingdom of Jorvik when it seemed all England must surely fall to the Norsemen; five thousand years before Christ, hunters sat atop this rock and looked east over what is now sea and saw there the richest hunting ground of Europe: the water meadows and marshes of Doggerland. All gone now, lost beneath the waves, when the Storegga Slide triggered the tsunami that cut Britain from Europe and started the island kingdom’s story. But, then, I knew nothing of this. All I knew was what I saw: the most magnificent castle I had ever seen – and I had never heard of it before.

However, I was in a good position to learn more, since my brother-in-law, Paul Gething, was one of the directors of the Bamburgh Research Project, an ongoing archaeological investigation into the castle and its surroundings. Paul and the BRP were busy revolutionising our understanding of the early medieval kingdom of Northumbria and, to make their work better known, Paul and I jointly wrote a book about the history and archaeology of the realm, called Northumbria: the Lost Kingdom. In writing that book, I learned about the kings of Northumbria and, in particular, the kings of the conversion period, when the pagan Anglo-Saxons converted to Christianity, and the kingdom reached a zenith of power: Edwin, Oswald and Oswiu. Reading their history, and the extraordinary story arc of their reigns, I thought that someone must surely have written about them before. But no one had. So I decided to. Edwin: High King of Britain was the first volume of The Northumbrian Thrones; Oswald: Return of the King came out in May 2015 and the final volume, Oswiu: King of Kings, I’ve just finished writing and it will be published in the autumn (or fall, for my north American readers).

I love the portrayal of Edwin’s faith journey in your book, as he moved from paganism to Christianity. I noticed in your biography that you yourself have had a bit of a faith journey of your own. How did your own personal experiences help you to write Edwin’s story? 

I don’t think it did help. Admittedly, I’ve been a bit around the houses with respect to faith (born Catholic, turned atheist at six, dabbled in occultism in my teens, experimented with mysticism, turned Sufi Muslim, back to where I started: if you’re interested, I managed to sneak it into my latest book, London: A Spiritual History, under the guise of using my own life as an example of the myriad spiritual histories that make up the arc of the city’s encounter with God), but when it comes to characters, I attempt to enter imaginatively into their worlds and their personalities, not import my own. This is particularly important in historical fiction, where the world the characters inhabit is so very different from my own.

However, I do find this time (7th-century Britain) particularly fascinating because of the clash of worldviews that characterised it, as the pagan, Germanic, illiterate but strongly oral culture of the Anglo-Saxons, the successful invaders, clashed, melded and reformed under the influence of the Christian, Latin (and Celtic), and literate civilisation of Europe and Ireland. There are fascinating parallels to draw with our own day, as well as much that is unique to the time and place.

What was the biggest challenge for you in writing this book? And is there anything you left out that you wish you could have included? 

Writing it as well as I could. No, nothing left out that I wanted to include.

You have written non-fiction and fiction. Do you enjoy writing one more than the other? 

Fiction.

Who is your favourite writer? (or writers, I know it can be hard to narrow it down!)

I’ll have to go for writers: JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson and Evelyn Waugh.

Once you have finished this series, do you think you will write more stories about this era? Or do you have something completely different planned? 

I’ll be working on a non-fiction book next, so nothing definite yet. Lots of different ideas – some very different indeed! – but at the moment I’m not sure.

Tell us about what you are working on now.

A couple of book proposals for non-fiction work. I’m just firming up the ideas and then my agent is going to start touting them round to publishers (I have just recently signed up with an agent for my non-fiction work but I still represent myself for my fiction).

And now, just for fun:

If you were going to hire someone to write a soundtrack for your novel, who would that be, and why? 

Catherine Groom. Expert in early music, brilliant composer and teacher, funniest writer on Facebook I’ve ever read, and she’s already written the music we used for the intro to the audio extract from Edwin: High King of Britain that you can hear here on my website.

Who would you cast to play Edwin in a film adaptation of your book?

Russell Crowe. Definitely.

Pizza or burger? 

Pizza (the clue’s in my name!).

Tea or coffee? 

Tea (my father is from Sri Lanka, home of the best tea in the world, and his father worked on the tea plantations there).

Favourite TV series?

I barely ever watch television nowadays. But the best series I’ve ever seen is undoubtedly the production of Brideshead Revisited staring Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews.

One piece of advice for new writers?

Read. And, if you can, become famous by some other means – this will ensure a publisher’s contract and get your books into stores throughout the land.

Thanks so much to Edoardo, for stopping by the blog today! I am so looking forward to delving into some of his other works – definitely I will be checking out his book on Northumbria. I’m eager to read the other books in his Northumbrian Throne series as well, but I will have to wait until my own are published. Somehow it’s tricky to read about a character you are trying to create in your own mind – too much second-guessing going on. 

I hope you all enjoyed this interview as much as I did!