Nevermoor author Jessica Townsend on JK Rowling, living with ADHD and her new book

Best-selling children’s author Jessica Townsend instructed her publisher to remove JK Rowling comparisons from the promotional material for her blockbuster Nevermoor series.

Author Jessica Townsend. Picture: Emma Nayler

It’s been an agonising wait for fans but the fourth book in your multi-award winning kids fantasy series Nevermoor is finally out this week – five years after Hollowpox: The Hunt for Morrigan Crow. What took so long? I won’t beat around the bush, it’s been quite a stressful few years. The biggest event was that I was diagnosed with ADHD. So I now have a very rich understanding of why this particular job, as a full-time author, is the best and worst job I could have. It’s exactly what my brain wants to do – come up with 20 million ideas and have a little galaxy of a fictional world in my head – but the flip side is I’m undertaking very large projects with long deadlines and having no understanding of how to do that.

Has the diagnosis improved your life? I know some people can be a little bit coy about taking ADHD medication, but literally, I would not have been able to finish this book without it. This book is nearly 160,000 words!

In the age of the iPad and Netflix, did you feel challenged by the idea of holding a kid’s attention over 160,000 words? I feel the same way about all new technology, and that is to say, none of it replaces the book in your hand. I see kids reading all the time, kids love books. The thing that does concern me about kids is their instantaneous access to entertainment, which means they’re never bored. I wonder if they’ll lose the ability to daydream because they don’t need to stand in line with their mum at the bank for 20 minutes.

Nevermoor veers into pretty dark territory. How do you measure what young readers can handle? I tend not to consciously think about it while I’m writing. The best thing I could do for any reader, whether adult or child, is to put the story first. I tackle dark events and themes, sure, but my books are also very silly. From the get-go, that has been my aesthetic.

Nevermoor became a global hit when it was released in 2017, and critics were comparing your work to JK Rowling. Was it a blessing or a curse? Years ago, I would have said a blessing. Now I am just so not interested. It used to be that it was such an honour because obviously, I loved the Harry Potter books growing up; it’s a cultural touchstone, and those books truly changed children’s publishing. My publisher would put those reviews on the cover of my books; I’ve since asked them to stop doing that. I said, we’re taking all mention of her out of the marketing.

Is that due to Rowling’s gender critical politics, which I gather you don’t agree with? (Her activism) was like a grenade that was thrown into our industry a few years ago, and it was very, very upsetting for a lot of people. I’m a queer woman and a trans ally and I don’t begrudge anyone making comparisons between her work and mine – that’s fine – but I feel we are in a golden age of children’s publishing now, and it’s time to decentre Rowling and the Potter series, there are other books we can centre.

It was revealed recently that the tech giants, such as Meta, had been using books to train their AI systems. Were yours among them? Yes, and it’s awful, depressing, exhausting and really f..king sad to think of the fight we are up against in this next few years, feeding this hungry technological machine. The people who are driving it are so unimaginative they have to steal the imagination of others. They actually think they are above the rules.

Do you wonder how your books might hold up in 100 years time or, if like some children’s classics, they may be edited? I know language changes and values change over time but as far as worrying about people changing my words? I’ll be dead, I won’t care. In some older children’s books there can be a lot of misogyny, fatphobia, a lot of meanness. There’s a lot of stuff that if that author wrote it today, would not get published. But, when you change the text you are ignoring the fact that an author wrote those words and that’s what they intended. I feel like I go in circles on this issue. I’m glad I don’t have to make those decisions.

Why are Australian authors so successful in the children’s and young adult fiction world? Australians have a good sense of humour – we write very funny books. Even the books that aren’t “funny”. Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi and John Marsden’s Tomorrow, When The War Began series are scary and dark, but they’re also funny and warm, which children’s books really benefit from.

What was your favourite book as a child? When I was nine, I read Little Women for the first time, and that is probably my favourite book of all time. Also Alibrandi and the Tomorrow series. But my gateway books were really The Baby-Sitters Club series.

What do you think is the common thread? It’s the gutsy heroine: Jo March, Ellie Linton, Josephine Alibrandi … and a bunch of 11-year-olds starting a business.

Silverborn: The Mystery of Morrigan Crow (Hachette) is out now