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| Interview with Diana Wynne Jones by Melanie Ashby AND do you know who the city’s most famous author is?’ the taxi driver asks, bursting with local pride. ‘I’ll give you a clue. She’s the richest in Britain.’ He reminds me that the nearby Avon village of Chipping Sodbury brought forth the stellar J K Rowling. And I tell him I’m due to interview her rival. Diana Wynne Jones, stubbing out her Superking, cheerfully answers the ‘J K’ question her publicist advised was best avoided with a tiny puff of a sigh. She is peeved that the Harry Potter novels revisit, sometimes quite closely, the boarding-school format she’d done some years back (Witch Week). But, on the bright side, the popularity of the Potter books has swung the field around from the ‘didactic and serious’. ‘It’s made a whole lot of people aware that this stuff is fun, interesting to read and that you can get a lot out of it.’ Wynne Jones may not have inspired such rapid popularity and hit the jackpot like Rowling, but her intelligent fantasy novels, first published in the early Seventies – have been steadily successful, even when the genre went through the doldrums in the Eighties. They are critically acclaimed (A S Byatt favoured Wynne Jones while taking a swipe at Rowling on publication of the fifth Harry Potter), and will shortly become the subject of a new academic tome by fantasy expert Farah Mendlesohn. Her books are also hugely loved by fans across the world, including anime director Hayao Miyazaki, whose Spirited Away became the international hit of 2003. His film of her novel Howl’s Moving Castle was released in Japan earlier this year, where it is making box office records, and will be out on general release here in the autumn. Watch out JK. This is all by the by, as Wynne Jones doesn’t see herself as a rival to Rowling… For the whole interview, read Issue 26 » Subscribe! Go to » Diana Wynne Jones' Method |
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For more on DIANA WYNNE JONES, go to www.leemac.freeserve.co.uk
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