Ten Terrifying Questions with the creators of Julia and the Shark!

Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Tom de Freston met in 2009, when Kiran was a student and Tom was artist-in-residence at Cambridge University. They have been a couple and collaborators ever since, but Julia and the Shark is their first novel. Kiran is the award-winning, bestselling author of stories including The Girl of Ink & Stars, The Way Past Winter, and The Deathless Girls, and Tom is making his illustrative debut having worked as an acclaimed artist for many years. They live in Oxford with their rescue cat Luna, in a house between a river and a forest.

Today, both Kiran and Tom are on the blog to take on our Ten Terrifying Questions! Read on …

Kiran Millwood Hargrave

1. To begin with, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself – where were you born? Raised? Schooled?

KMH: I was born, raised, AND schooled in a county called Surrey, UK, which sounds like an apology and kind of is. My parents’ house was a haven of colour and character in what is essentially a comfortable, vanilla commuter suburb. Their house where I spent my childhood is really old – four hundred years old! – and beautifully wonky: creaky stairs, worn banisters, wisteria growing in through the windows. It was always full of music and great food and strangers – my parents would collect ‘strays’ (sad-looking people on trains, confused people from supermarkets) and invite them for dinner – and brilliant stories of course. I had a very happy childhood. School I found tougher, falling on the bad side of some cruel rumours and never quite feeling good enough. But my solid foundation meant I felt steady even in the hardest times.

TdF: I was born in London but we moved to Devon, to live by the sea, when I was three. So the sea feels like it has always run through me. My earliest memories are all of dreams full of the sea, seeping into bedrooms. Thinking about it now, very much like the dream scenes in Julia and the Shark. I used to spend hours lost in imaginary games, or in drawing wild creatures and strange islands, so I suppose it was inevitable I would become an artist. At school there was a sense I had a funny brain, one that worked in slightly different rhythms and patterns. I have three sisters, and we used to put on musicals and concerts for my mum. Thankfully the ears of the world have been saved from my noise ever since.

2. What did you want to be when you were twelve, eighteen and thirty? And why?

KMH: At twelve, I think I was still just about clinging to my dream of being an astronaut. But from 13 onwards, when we took SATs, it became clear I wasn’t good enough at science. At eighteen, I dreamt of being a lighting technician in the theatre. And at thirty (last year), I was living my dream of being an author. It’s the best job going.

TdF: At twelve I don’t think I really gave much thought to what I might become, but did have a love of maths, of the sense of it revealing the hidden patterns of the world. I also knew I would always want to make art, to enter imaginary worlds, but didn’t really think about it as a job. At eighteen I was split between becoming a Physicist or an artist. At thirty I had been an artist for a while, but had started to realise that words were as important as paint, that really it was all about constructing worlds and telling stories.

3. What strongly held belief did you have at eighteen that you don’t have now?

KMH: That hard work can get you anywhere. It’s quite an insidious belief upon reflection, playing into conservative ideas about how you get what you deserve. Now, I believe you get what you get. I understand factors like privilege in achievement, and see that sometimes the odds are fixed against you if you come from a certain background. Hard work is important, but that work counts for more from certain people.

TdF: The first day of my art foundation course was the day of the Twin Towers attack. It made me certain that I should not paint images, that I should not make paintings that told stories, that the world was already full of enough suffering, noise and confusion. For the next four years my work was entirely abstract. I now think the opposite, that art cannot exist as a closed door, that it is in an open and complex dialogue with the chaos of the world and history.

Tom de Freston

4. What are three works of art – this could be a book, painting, piece of music, film, etc – that influenced your development as a writer?

KMH: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez awakened me to so many things: magical realism, saga, texture/colour in fiction, humour. I adore that book – it’s my most-often read I think. Ten Love Songs by Susan Sundfør is an album but absolutely functions as one piece of music – it lulls me every time I hear it, pushes me into an almost meditative state so that no matter where I am I feel in the mood to write. I always talk about how I feel my writing process is cinematic in that it is like watching a film in my head, very much driven by visuals, but I’m not drawn to a particular film when I think about my writing development. It feels like cheating to choose one of Tom’s paintings (though it would be an untitled image he made of two people holding hands in the sea that hangs in his mum’s kitchen), so my final choice would be a poem: ‘A Meadow’ by Lucie Brock-Broido. She is one of my favourite poets and I adore her use of baroque language – perfect, strange, exquisite words.

TdF: John Keats’ ‘Spring Ode’ honestly felt like something had exploded in my brain. Like new possibilities had been presented to me about what poetry, art and language were capable of. Of the ability of art to offer up transcendence from tangible reality, of it to slow down time, to model new ways of being. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak still influences all my work, like a guidebook of the places art can take us. Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa was the painting that acted like a bridge into the whole history of art, the image that returned me to the idea of narrative in paint.

5. Considering the many artistic forms out there, what appeals to you about writing a children’s book?

KMH: Most of us writers fall in love with books as a child. Writing kids’ books is a lot about capturing that magic for me. It is near-impossible to replicate that feeling as an adult – the wonder and joy of finding a story that feels like it’s written only for you. Being the writer of that book for someone motivates me every day. Children make the best readers: uncynical but also entirely motivated by enjoyment. They will put your book down if they don’t like it, no matter who recommended it or whether it won a prize.

TdF: When I was a child books, both in words and image, offered these magical portals into an endless array of worlds. It still feels so wondrous to be able to open up a book and find yourself transported to another place and time. The idea of making a book together for children felt like a chance to conjure something similar, to try to make a book that children might feel they can fall into.

6. Please tell us about your latest book!

Julia and the Shark is a collaboration between us, with Kiran writing words and Tom creating images to build a story of both elements. It follows a girl called Julia, who travels with her parents to the Shetland islands for the summer. Her dad is programming a lighthouse, and her mum is searching for a Greenland shark, a creature which can live for over four hundred years. Julia makes friends with an island boy called Kin, but quickly gets dragged into her mum’s obsession with the shark. It’s an adventure story, as well as a celebration of nature and an exploration of mental illness.

7. What do you hope people take away with them after reading your work?

KMH: I hope children realise there are words for the hard stuff, the difficult feelings they may have. That it’s good to talk about it. And that nature is full of incredible things, and well worth protecting!

TdF: To offer roots into and out of dark spaces, to realise that things can be overwhelming, complex and unexplainable, but to know that even in the darkest depths there is always light and hope. To not feel we should pick between the arts and science, that they are all tools to unravel the wonders of the world, nature and the self.

8. Who do you most admire in the writing world and why?

KMH: Margaret Atwood. She effortlessly moves through genres: poetry, plays, fiction, children’s books, and is always pushing herself, trying new things. They aren’t always successful, but that means she’s not afraid to fail. That way invention lies.

TdF: Rebecca Solnitt. I think she is the best essayist currently writing, able to mix complex thinking with lyrical prose and a depth of humanity.

9. Many artists set themselves very ambitious goals. What are yours?

KMH: A lifelong career in writing. I want to be successful enough to continue to make a living off writing full time, and have mass appeal without compromising on my artistic integrity. Basically: film deals AND literary prizes!

TdF: I see any form of success as providing the means, opportunities and permissions to make the exact work I want to make, to lean into a particular and idiosyncratic vision.

10. Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

KMH: Resilience and self-belief are a must. It’s a tough world, when art and commerce mix, which is what writing for publication is. You have to remain soft and tough all at once. Focus on what you can control, which is the quality of the writing – everything else is marketing!

TdF: Read, look, engage. You are not an island, take everything in and let it form a glorious mulch. Don’t focus on the end product, everything emerges from the process, dive headfirst into the unknowns and darkness of that. Making art is an exploration, not a drive towards a known endpoint.

—Julia and the Shark by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, with illustrations by Tom de Freston (Hachette Australia) is out now.

Julia and the Shark

by Kiran Millwood Hargrave & Tom de Freston

Julia has followed her mum and dad to live on a remote island for the summer - her dad, for work; her mother, on a determined mission to find the elusive Greenland shark. But when her mother's obsession threatens to submerge them all, Julia finds herself on an adventure with dark depths and a lighthouse full of hope...

A beautiful, lyrical, uplifting story about a mother, a daughter, and love - with timely themes of the importance of science and the environment...

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