Author Chat With Philip Womack (Wildlord), Plus Giveaway! ~ US Only!

Today we are very excited to share an interview with author Philip Womack (Wildlord)!

Read on to learn more about him, his book, and a giveaway!

Meet the Author: Philip Womack

Philip Womack was born in Chichester in the middle of a thunderstorm in 1981. He is the author of several critically acclaimed novels for children: The Other Book, The Liberators; the Darkening Path trilogy, comprising The Broken King, The King’s Shadow and The King’s Revenge; The Double Axe, a reimagining of the Minotaur myth. The Arrow of Apollo, also set in the ancient world, was published in May 2020.

Wildlord, his first teen fiction, was published in October 2021.

How to Teach Classics to Your Dog: A Quirky Introduction to the Greeks and Romans (for adults) was published in October 2020.

Philip was educated at Lancing, and Oriel College, Oxford, where he read Classics and English. He lives in London with his wife, the architect Tatiana von Preussen, his son, two daughters, and his lurcher.

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About the Book: Wildlord

Tom Swinton is not looking forward to the summer. His parents are dead, and he is going to have to spend the holidays in his boarding school. But when he receives a mysterious letter inviting him to come to his uncle’s farm, he is determined to go, even though he has never heard of this uncle, James Swinton, commonly known as Jack.

His uncle seems genial enough at first; but the silver-haired and silver-eyed boy, Kit, who does most of the work about Mundham Farm, is fearful and strange; and the attractive young woman, Zita, who keeps house and prepares mysterious potions, is certainly no ordinary housekeeper.

Jack reveals to Tom that he needs his help to protect the farm from unspecified forces, and his principal duty will be to work with Kit to ”make the wards” – which is a way of surrounding the farm with some kind of magical protection. Jack explains that the farm can only be properly protected if a Swinton performs this ritual, and since Tom is the last of the line, it is up to him to protect Mundham. This is the first inkling Tom has that he may himself have magical powers.

The forces threatening the farm are the Samdya, a tribe of noble but wild and violent supernatural beings, who sometimes take a kind of human form and for whom the balance of the world is important. Tom meets one of these mysterious beings in the woods near the farm, and she tells him that the reason the Samdhya are constantly attacking Mundham is because they want to rescue one of their number who has been held captive by Jack for many decades, maybe even centuries.

By now, Tom knows that Zita and Kit are also held against their will on the farm and it is not long before he realises that he too has no way of escaping: he is bound by Jack’s evil spells. Jack tries to win Tom over by offering to show him his dead parents, whom Tom longs to see, and for a while he is taken in by false images of his mother and father; but when he finally witnesses the scene of his parents’ death by drowning, the awful realisation dawns that it was Jack who summoned up the terrible storm that swept over the boat and killed them.

When Jack imprisons Kit, Zita and Tom in what appears to be a glass box, but is really a kind of parallel world, it takes all of Zita’s considerable magical powers to help them escape, but they are not free for long.

Tom confronts Jack on several occasions, but Jack is very powerful and always emerges victorious. When the awful sound of the Samdhya wardrums announces that they are gathering and are about to descend on the farm to rescue the captive, Tom knows he must find a way to overcome his enemy.

Once Jack is defeated, trapped inside his own magical creation and flung to his death, the farm and its inhabitants are released from the painful spells in which he had enmeshed them, and peace is restored between the Samdhya and the humans.

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~Author Chat~

YABC:  What gave you the inspiration to write this book? 

I’ve always been interested in folklore and fairies, and I’ve always loved stories of the Sidhe – the elf-like creatures that live in mounds and live alongside us. In Suffolk, where I spend a lot of time, there are lots of mounds; there are also lots of houses with moats. So from there it was a pretty straightforward deduction – that moats were there to stop the Sidhe getting in. The only question that remained was – what was in the house, and why did the Sidhe want to get in? So it was landscape, really, and folklore.

YABC: Who is your favorite character in the book? 

I’m very fond of all them – they each have their special ways. Tom is a thoughtful boy but he can be a bit proud sometimes; Zita I think I have a particular fondness for; but then Kit’s fate is so hard, I feel very sorry for him.

YABC: Which came first, the title or the novel? 

The novel went through several titles, which I kept somewhere, including, at one point, “The Tiger Crouches”. Yes, readers, you can see that it takes a long time to come up with something that works…

YABC: What scene in the book are you most proud of, and why? 

I think when Tom goes out into the woods to talk to the Samdhya (the magical beings guarding the house), and they all surround him with their spears and some turn into animals – that’s the one I’m most proud of, because it’s hard to suggest so much movement and action in one small place.

YABC:  Thinking way back to the beginning, what’s the most important thing you’ve learned as a writer from then to now? 

The most important thing I’ve learned is that writing doesn’t just happen. It takes time to draft, and time to redraft. The more you think about something, the better it gets.

YABC: What do you like most about the cover of the book? 

I love the cover – it’s so evocative, and I especially like all the little hints at what’s inside – the hare, the silver ribbons coming from the hands, the spooky house.

YABC: What new release book are you looking most forward to in 2022? 

I’m most looking forward to reading Frances Hardinge’s new book, The Unravelling, about a child who can unravel curses.

YABC: What’s a book you’ve recently read and loved? 

I wasn’t a big Diana Wynne Jones fan as a child, and only came to read her as an adult; she wrote a lot, so I’ve been picking them up every now and again. I loved Castle in the Air, her sequel to Howl’s Moving Castle. I also re-read Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel, a classic adventure I loved as a child, and similarly, The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope Hawkins. Both splendid, swashbuckling narratives.

YABC:   What’s up next for you? 

I have a non-fiction creative writing book coming out in America in November, called WRITE YOUR OWN SCI-FI, published by Union Square. And there is a sequel to Wildlord in the works, which I hope will be out next year…

YABC:   Which was the most difficult or emotional scene to narrate?  

I think when Tom confronts what happens to his parents on the boat – that was very hard to deal with, emotionally, because there’s so much going on – his love for them, his fears for the future, his growing awareness of what has been going on.

 YABC:    Which character gave you the most trouble when writing your latest book? 

None of them really gave me any trouble – because I tend to think about them a lot before I write, they tend to do what they’re supposed to do, without sounding too strange about it. Meg, the main character, is quite feisty, and Skander, her friend, is a complicated fellow. I hope you’ll meet some of them soon!

YABC:    What is the main message or lesson you would like your reader to remember from this book? 

I think Wildlord is about power: that you can have plenty of power but use it in absolutely the wrong way. We face a world in which power is increasingly concentrated into smaller numbers of hands – the internet companies, or repressive governments. Knowledge can be twisted by the wrong people, and it’s so important to make sure that the new generations grow up able to read and research freely.

YABC:      What would you say is your superpower? 

Being on time.

YABC:     Is there an organization or cause that is close to your heart? 

I work closely with the Society of Authors, helping the rights of authors in the United Kingdom. I also love Classics for All, a small charity that provides help for Latin and Greek teaching in state schools.

YABC:   What advice do you have for new writers?   

Read. Read, read, read. Read everything you can lay your hands on. If you think a book is “difficult” or “not for you”, then ignore that, and read it anyway. Read Middlemarch. Read Jane Austen. Read Frank Herbert, J G Ballard, Iris Murdoch, Kazuo Ishiguro… read everything you can lay your hands on. And, at the same time, write – experiment. Write with the lights off, the internet off, your phone off. Write with a pen and paper in a corner of a quiet room where nobody can disturb you. Don’t think that what you’ve written is finished. It never is.

YABC:   Is there anything that you would like to add? 

I hope that Wildlord will reach new readers in America – I’m really excited about it coming out over there!

~ Giveaway Details ~

 (5) FIVE winners will receive a copy of Wildlord (Philip Womack) ~US/CAN ONLY

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