… the charming Charles Tan kindly interviewed me a few weeks back – here t’is a sampler:
Hi! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. First off, what got you interested in speculative fiction?
I’ve always had a lot of fantasy/science fiction in my reading lists. I blame my mother for starting me on fairytales as a child and the traumatising effects of ‘The Little Match Girl’ . A few years ago when I was looking for a topic to do my Masters (Research) on, I thought about the idea of reloading fairytales as Angela Carter did in the seventies (‘The Bloody Chamber’ in particular) and Emma Donoghue (‘Kissing the Witch’) did recently – and as a lot of women have done over time. Those two were simply the ones I decided to study for the exegetical component. The creative work was a collection of 9 reloaded fairytales, called ‘Black-Winged Angels’. I guess you just find your natural genre and this seems to be mine. I love the interplay of reality and confounded expectations, of imagination and flights of fancy that make up the spec-fic field. It’s exciting to take a holiday in someone else’s head!
The rest lives here http://charles-tan.blogspot.com/2010/01/interview-angela-slatter.html