Amanda Craig target=new>interviews Lian Hearn in "The Times". Hearn is the Adelaide-based author of the Tales of the Otori series of young adult novels. And excellent stuff they are too.
Oddly enough Craig starts the interview rather strangely: "The true identity of Lian Hearn was until recently one of the most closely guarded secrets of children's literature. Who was the author of the bestselling novel Across the Nightingale Floor, an adventure set in medieval Japan about which readers from 8 to 80 became passionate in the space of a single chapter? Was it a man or a woman? Was the author Japanese or European?"
I had to check the date on this piece (September 16, 2006) and ponder the nature of the phrase "until recently", before I came to the conclusion that Craig has been living in an alternate universe for the past couple of years. I'm not sure when I became aware that Lian Hearn was really Gillian Robinstein but I'm pretty certain is was about the time the first novel in the series was published, ie in 2002. You can actually read a review of the book by Peter Pierce in "The Sydney Morning Herald", where the author's real name is revealed in the first line. And how did I find this? By typing in the name of the novel into Google Australia and selecting the first entry. All reviewers make mistakes but a little bit, a teensy bit, of checking would have alerted the writer to the true story.
Other
than that, the interview is quite reasonable, even if it doesn't delve all that deeply.
