Deborah Harkness
Deborah Harkness
Deborah Harknessis an American scholar, novelist and wine enthusiast, best known as a historian and the author of the "All Souls" Trilogy which consists of the The New York Times best selling novel A Discovery of Witches and its sequels Shadow of Night and The Book of Life...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
CountryUnited States of America
complexity drinks good interest terms
For me, a $20 wine that drinks like a $40 wine in terms of complexity and interest is a value, while a $5 wine that is not very good is not a value at all in my opinion.
anne books vampire whose witch
I'm a professional non-fiction reader, that's what I do. But in my 20s we had our own vampire and witch moment, courtesy of Anne Rice, whose books I read and loved.
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My niece was very much caught up in the vampire craze for young adults, and she thought having a vampire boyfriend would be a cool thing. What do you do on a first date? The more I thought about it, the more fun I had imagining what you'd serve a vampire for dinner.
amazingly craft either extreme family hair home people slightly straight witches
Witches are the kind of more traditional, home and family, craft people - so they're the ones who are making things; crocheting shawls and things like that. But then they also have that slightly confident, dangerous, edge. I always see them as having very extreme hair, either amazingly beautiful straight hair or kind of wild.
assume believe fairly rush tastes whatever
A lot of our assumptions of the world are fairly cynical, fairly negative, and assume the worst. What our reading tastes show - in this rush to fantasy, romance, whatever - is that we actually still want to believe in a world of possibility, in a world of mystery.
colin films fix imaging wonderful
Films are wonderful but they do fix an identity. I can't read 'Pride and Prejudice' anymore, for instance, without imaging Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy.
death literature note park until vampires western whether women
There were no vampires of note in Western literature until about the 18th century. But they tell us where we park our anxieties, whether its over-powerful women, death or damnation. We make our own monsters.
empathize helping highlights lived love people students time
I really love helping students and helping them empathize with people who lived a really long time ago. That's one of the highlights of working in fiction.
convoluted maybe midwife series time title
Once upon a time, about 10 years ago, I thought maybe I could write a mystery series about a midwife in Elizabethan England. I had an elaborately convoluted title and an elaborately convoluted plotline, and at that point I got stupendously bored.
cheap defined depends spending
Cheap wine is defined by its price, and it depends on personal spending limits. So for me, any wine under $10 is cheap.
characters clues few historical pages plot relevant resist throughout
I couldn't resist hiding some historical details and a few clues relevant to the plot and characters of 'A Discovery of Witches' throughout the pages of the novel.
bump demons interested people reading realised subjects today
I realised that today we are very much interested in reading about subjects that would have also interested people in the 1500s: ghosts, demons and things that go bump in the night.
books discovery exploding grew hope love serve teach voracious
I teach 18- to 21-year-olds - the 'Harry Potter' generation. They grew up as voracious readers, reading books in this exploding genre. But at some point, I would love for them to give Umberto Eco or A.S. Byatt a try. I hope 'A Discovery of Witches' will serve as a kind of stepping-stone.
appreciation measured popular
The world of scholarship is much more measured in its appreciation and also its criticism than the world of popular literature.