Anna North is the author of the instant New York Times bestseller and Reese's Book Club pick Outlawed, America Pacifica, and Lambda Literary Award winner The Life and Death of Sophie Stark. She is also a senior correspondent at Vox. Her most recent novel, Bog Queen, was published in October by Bloomsbury in the US and Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK.

Interview by Nirica Srinivasan

I’d love to hear about where this story started from. There’s so many threads through this novel—the environmental angle, the forensics of the bog body in the 2018 timeline, the druid in the historical one. What inspired this story at first? How did it grow from there?

I’ve been obsessed with bog bodies for a really long time. I think it started with Lindow Man in the British Museum, but I also saw an exhibit on the Raspberry Girl at a museum in Sweden that really affected me. I find it so moving that these human beings have been preserved for thousands of years, long enough for us to see them and learn so much about their lives. When I look at Lindow Man, it’s so clear to me that he’s still a person, even though he’s dead. It was that realization that really inspired Agnes’s character for me.

Some of the initial plot of the book was also inspired by the story of Lindow Woman, which just transfixed me when I first learned about it — the discovery of a woman’s body, the mistaken identity and the husband’s confession, the revelation that the body was actually thousands of years old. That story was sort of the germ of the mystery in Bog Queen.

I actually wasn’t sure I was going to write from the druid’s perspective until I visited Lindow Moss, where Lindow Man and Lindow Woman were found. While I was there, I read Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, by Rivka Galchen, which was probably the biggest literary inspiration for Bog Queen. I loved how funny that book was, how it conjured the past without making it dusty or pretentious. Something about reading it while I was in the place where the real bog bodies were found — and where they lived, thousands of years ago — made me realize that a narrator from the Iron Age had to be part of the story. It ended up being a crucial part — I don’t think Bog Queen would exist without the druid’s voice.

Something I really admire across your books is that you write in (and play with) such a range of settings and genres—the Western, the polyphonic novel, the post-apocalyptic. Bog Queen is so atmospheric, both in the historical timeline and the present one. There’s a really rich drawing out of a world, also in the language and references you use (in my notes are “wine-dark,” immediately making me think of The Odyssey; the story of Romulus and Remus; the reference to “full fathoms five”).

I would love to hear more about that process for you, in two ways—on the language level, what is it like to step into this rich, almost mythic historic space and create that consistent world across timelines? And on a process level, what kind of research and work did Bog Queen take?

I’m going to answer these questions in reverse order! I did a lot of research for Bog Queen, starting with going to Lindow Moss in England and taking an incredibly helpful tour with a local environmental group. I also interviewed several forensic anthropologists to understand what Agnes’s work would be like. And I read a lot about life in Iron Age Britain — what foods people might have eaten, what their houses might have looked like, what they might have worn. The most fun for me was probably choosing names for the Iron Age characters, most of which I took from this database of real names from the time period.

With regard to the first question, I like to think of my books as either set in our world or in another, alternate world. Outlawed is set in an alternate world, but Bog Queen is set in our world. So I did want it to have some realism. On the other hand, there’s so much we don’t know about life in Iron Age Britain, because the Britons of that time period didn’t have written language. So I tried to hew to what we do know while at the same time creating my own world. I think getting the druid’s voice — and, by extension, as you say, the language of those parts of the book — was key to creating this world. Once I felt like I was inside her head, those sections became easy to write.

The present storyline in Bog Queen is set in 2018, in the UK. Can you talk a bit about why you decided on that particular political moment?

I started writing this book in 2021, when lockdowns were a recent memory and Covid had made really big changes to daily life. At that time it was hard to know whether those changes would be permanent or not, or what the world would look like in a year or two, and setting a novel in the present felt like trying to hit a moving target. So I decided to set the book a few years before the pandemic began. That also put it in the midst of Brexit negotiations, which I don’t touch on a ton in the book, but which did feel right as a historical backdrop. The druid in her sections wants to bring Britain closer to the wider world, and it’s fitting that in Agnes’s sections, Britain is sort of moving in the opposite direction.

I was immediately drawn to Agnes as a character, and I found her backstory so compelling and slightly unsettling—her discomfort with her father and her boyfriend felt jarring especially because it’s kind of subtle. She realizes that “the men began speaking for her in ordinary daily interactions,” or the way she feels “as though even her body was not her own.” (This last line is especially interesting when she’s spending so much time with bodies and trying to piece together the stories they tell about people!)

And the druid’s storyline also works as this really interesting mirror—another woman who is leaning into her “calling,” and who is also at the mercy of societal forces. I’d love to hear more about how you thought of these two women as characters, and how you thought of them in relation to each other.

Agnes gave me a lot of trouble for a while! I really love her and I always felt like I understood her in some way, but for a while I don’t think it was coming across on the page. I see Agnes as someone who’s very secure in her professional calling, which I think she views as almost spiritual, but who is sort of struggling to form an identity in other ways. Even now it’s a little hard for me to describe her but I see her so clearly in my mind — her laugh, her confusion, her desires and loneliness. This book is not autobiographical but I think I was like her in certain ways in my twenties; I had a good idea of what I wanted to do with my life but otherwise I was a little bit at sea. And Agnes also has trouble being a person in society, performing expected social graces and interacting with people, which is something I also struggled with when I was younger. A lot of my characters have this sort of friction and discomfort with the social world, which is something I very much felt as a child and a twentysomething, and that I feel less now I think both because of practice and because I find that people become softer and more forgiving as they get older and it is more okay to be a little strange.

The ecological throughline in Bog Queen is anchored primarily by the peat moss in which they find the body, and the chapters told from the moss’s perspective (!) really serve to locate the druid and Agnes as dots on a timeline that’s much, much larger than either of them can really comprehend.

I thought that balance was really interesting—between the power and importance of individual or collective actions (like the violence enacted against the bodies that end up in the moss, or toward the moss itself), and the reminder of our ultimate insignificance in the grand scheme of things. What was that balance like to draw?

I really loved writing about (and as) the moss. I did a ton of research about peat and sphagnum, and I loved learning how bog ecosystems work. I read this book called Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life that helped me think about how the moss might experience its existence. When it came to the role of the moss in the story and its relationship to humans, I wanted to show both that humans can have a destructive (or preservative) effect on non-human beings, but also that those beings exist all around us and without us. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take action to try to protect vulnerable landscapes, but it does mean we should remember that humans aren’t always the main character on this earth. I think a little humility can actually help pull us out of climate despair — yes, we are doing a lot of damage to the living beings around us, but also there was life on earth before we evolved and there will be life after we go extinct. Sometimes it’s helpful to me to remember that as loud and messy as we are, humans are still just a blip in the long history of the earth.

There’s an interesting strand in Bog Queen that feels connected to a kind of cultural obsession with true crime. Was this something you were thinking of as you wrote the book? I found Agnes’s interactions with Dorotea really interesting in this respect.

That’s interesting! I didn’t actually think about this much when I was writing the book — I’m not a big consumer of true crime. I do think of the book as playing with the murder mystery and police procedural genres; I thought a lot about how mysteries work as I was constructing the book’s plot. I guess when it comes to true crime, my one thought is that I want this book to be respectful of the dead and of their bodies, the way Agnes is. I think there’s room for debate about whether Agnes’s approach is the right one (whether it’s better to study the body or to return it to the earth, for example). But I do think there can be a tendency in our culture to sensationalize and even fetishize the bodies of murder victims, especially women, and I think Agnes would really take issue with that.

How does your journalism work interact with your novel writing, or vice versa? Did connections emerge while you were writing Bog Queen in specific?

I really love both sides of my writing career, even though they’re very different and it can sometimes be difficult to balance them in my head and in my life. I think journalism keeps me engaged with the world, which is really helpful for fiction. On a practical level, journalism has also trained me to identify and interview experts, which can be very helpful when you’re doing novel research! With Outlawed, there were pretty clear connections between my journalism on reproductive health and politics and the themes of the book. The connections are less clear in Bog Queen, but I do think it was informed by work I’ve done on climate change and our human response to climate change. And I’m actually working on a journalistic piece about peatlands conservation now!

Were there any books or pieces of media you looked toward for inspiration while writing Bog Queen, or that you think make good companion pieces? (I personally found myself thinking of Kelly Reichardt’s film First Cow!)

Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, which I mention above, was probably the biggest influence. I was also reading Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies on my trip to the bog, and that book also inspired me a lot, though more indirectly, via its language and the way it melds and plays with genre. I wouldn’t say Seamus Heaney’s bog poems necessarily influenced the book, but they’re obviously an important precursor and the source of the title — I quote from my favorite one, “The Grauballe Man,” in the epigraph.

I always get a lot of inspiration from TV, and for this book I thought a lot about The Kettering Incident, a really strange show set in Tasmania that also has some environmental themes. I thought about the main character, Anna Macy (played by Elizabeth Debicki), sometimes when I was writing Agnes — I think she has that combination of lostness and drive that I was trying to convey.

Thanks so much for these smart questions, and for the opportunity to talk about the book!

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Nirica Srinivasan is a writer and illustrator from India. She likes stories with ambiguous endings and unreliable narrators.

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