SATURDAY SPOTLIGHT NO.6 – SARAH TANBURN

Complementing the author spotlights I ran from 2011 to 2016, today’s Saturday Spotlight, the sixth, is of Sarah Tanburn. If you would like to take part in a spotlight, see Saturday spotlights.

Sarah Tanburn is a sailor and hiker, activist and student and, of course, a writer. Like so many of us, she wrote continuously as a child but then life got in the way and for some years her creativity went elsewhere.

Since the millennium, she has been back in the business of staring at a screen wondering whether that comma is a good idea or why her character wants a different name. Or why the story she’s produced is somehow different from the glittering thing she imagined when lying in bed or walking up a hill, dreaming it into being – but is nonetheless rather more polished.

Sarah’s fiction has appeared in various places: including The Ocean is my Lover which first came out in 2004 and has been republished since. Switzerland won the Get Writing Cup and was featured on the National Short Story website. The First Taste is available on WiFiles and Misplaced is in the 2021 Aliens anthology from Iron Press. In 2019, her novella Hawks of Dust and Wine came second in the Rheidol Prize. That tale spawned four more, all set in the same world but with markedly different heroines and challenges.

Lady Turtle Press is about to publish (12 May 2023) the five stories as a collection under the title Children of the Land, or Plant y Tir in Cymraeg. Embedded in the beautiful Welsh landscape and drawing on the country’s rich mythology, Sarah invites us all to think about nationhood, climate change, and the power of magic in our lives. Her work has been compared to Ursula le Guin and Angela Carter: high praise indeed! If you love magical realism with a political edge, or just enjoy meeting extraordinary new women, do take a look.

Sarah is finishing a novel: Who is William Brown? is set in Wales, London, the Caribbean and at sea during the Napoleonic wars. It tells the story of a young Black woman who (according to the archives) served in the Royal Navy. Sarah has drawn on her own experiences as a mariner, a storyteller, a campaigner and a lesbian to create a new heroine exploring the sea and liberty.

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And now from the author herself:

One raw December day I was walking the hills of Powys with a friend. I was researching a route from Brecon to the coast for my character William, who goes that way when she is unexpectedly freed from the demands of servanthood and revolution. Instead, I stumbled on a completely different story, which led to the book Children of the Land.

Big hedges, taller than me and a metre thick, line the narrow lanes thereabouts. Some of them were netted in that hideous green drapery that I have since learnt is to enable development by stopping small birds nesting. It’s a horrid tactic but I have a reason to be grateful. When I asked a passing farmer why it had been done, he talked about a mews just up the hill where they were breeding hawks for racing in the Arabian peninsula. They change hands for astonishing sums, he told us, maybe £20,000 a bird.

I was convinced there was a story in this notion, but it eluded me as we tramped along in the cold. When I got home, whisky beside me, I noodled online, procrastinating. Welsh hawks, I thought, wondering whether our mythology would yield a tale. What riches I found in the story of the Adar Llwch Gwin, the Arthurian griffons from the back of the north wind who had been the downfall of their beloved master. I wrote a scene of a sheikh sitting at a marble table as grey sunlight poured through overhead glass. He took dust from an ornate box and added a pinch to his chalice of ruby wine. The girl opposite him spoke in Welsh as if repeating a charm, (My Welsh is poor: these stories are in English.)

Thus I met Adain, hawkmistress and wife to the Prince Ustura. The story poured out of me over Xmas and New Year, set in a possibly-dystopian future Wales of climate change and global fragmentation. After it was done and successful in the Rheidol Prize, run by the New Welsh Reader, I meant to devote myself wholly to William. But the ideas born in that wonderful outpouring were not so easily put away.

Each story in Children of the Land explores a different aspect of that world. After Adain, came Enfys who must fight the shapeshifting afanc to protect the waters of Wales, saving her new-born son from the wreckage. Dai and Kaveri build a strange business together while Morgan and Magda remake the coastline to provide a safe harbour for the new arriving turtles coming north from warming seas. Mwyn does not fully know who or what she is but she is determined to become the Lady of Cymru: all she has is her mining expertise and her mother’s advice. You must breed and you must kill.

I am now finishing the story of William Brown, which is amazing in a different way. I loved writing Children of the Land: I hope you enjoy reading it just as much.

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Sarah can be found on Twitter via @workthewind.

Her book reviews appear in various places, most commonly www.nation.cymru. Her prose poem December:Dusk is on Ink, Sweat and Tears. In 2021, her environmental memoir Platinum and Salt was featured in Superlative magazine.

Sarah is available for readings, talks and workshops via [email protected]

www.ladyturtlepress.cymru (includes link to buy)

Twitter: @ladyturtlepress

From Wales Book Council: https://www.gwales.com/bibliographic/?isbn=9781739348809&tsid=3 or Amazon. Available from all good bookshops.

Trade link for retailers: https://siop.llyfrau.cymru/bibliographic/?isbn=9781739348809&tsid=37

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If you would like to take part in an author spotlight, see Saturday Spotlights or email me for details.