Q&A: Sascha Stronach
The Dawnhounds is a queer, Māori-inspired debut fantasy that Tamsyn Muir says is “intensely humane and beautiful”. The author Sascha Stronach answers our quick Q&A.
1. How are you and what have you been up to lately?
I handed in the first draft of book two earlier this year, and I've been taking a holiday while it's out with my editor. I've spent the last few months basically just walking in the hills around Wellington.
I'm honestly not sure how well I'm going to handle being back on the job and not able to just disappear into the bush for an afternoon.
2. If you were working in a bookshop, how would you hand-sell your book to customers? What would you say to convince them to buy and read it?
Oh god, I can happily sell others' art but I'm terrible at selling my own, I'm too close to it, so I've gotta rely on what others have said.
It's Terry Pratchett meets Jeff VanderMeer meets Tamsyn Muir meets Disco Elysium meets Arcane meets Our Flag Means Death.
It's a hopeful book but not a naive one, hope with teeth, a book about finding joy in the darkest places. It's got pirates, Te Reo, queer folks, anarchism, mushrooms.
Are you a possum / raccoon / goblin / cryptid / anxious gay punk / beautiful perfect trash witch? Read the book, eat the book, tear the book up to use as bedding, it's all good.
3. What books (or other art/media) influenced you while working on this book, or generally in your life?
The Locked Tomb definitely loomed large. I'd never seen a major international sci-fi/fantasy title throw around phrases like "absolutely chockas". It made me feel a lot more confident about writing in a Kiwi voice. I'd spent months trying to strip out everything that might alienate a US audience then I got hit with this incredibly Kiwi book that the Yanks were absolutely eating up.
Pratchett was my go-to comfort read when I was a teenager, I've read some of those books dozens of times, the Watch novels in particular. While I didn't have them in mind when I set out, it's a comparison I've seen half a dozen times now and I don't think that's a coincidence. I'm deeply flattered by it and also terrified; those are huge shoes that I'm not sure I ever intended to fill.
4. What good books have you read lately?
I really loved Becky Chambers' A Psalm for the Wild-Built, which I'd dragged my feet on because people sold it to me as a fluffy feel-good gentle bubble bath and not "Sartre is desperately trying to get lost in the woods but Camus won't let him".
On my bedside table right now there's Rebecca Hawkes' Meat Lovers, which is wonderful – I think we're seeing the emergence of a very gutsy and visceral NZ poetic tradition, a thing that ties emotional and physical vulnerability together in powerful ways. The world is big and hard while we are small and soft, and there is something joyous and silly and terrifying about grappling with it.
Buy The Dawnhounds (Simon & Schuster), $35
