Rob Keeley is the 2nd place winner in the WforW Georgina Hawtrey-Woore Award for Independent Authors: Fiction for Young Adults Category with his sharp and evocative novel High Spirits.
No one ever thinks I have a real job. One thing I’m asked all the time as an author – even by friends – is what I do all day. I list everything that goes into writing, producing and promoting a book, and tell them I’m always at my desk by nine (earlier if possible) and there until five. They never believe me.
For the last four years much of my working life has centred on the ghostly time-travelling adventures of Ellie, the main character in my Spirits novels. Having written books based around the Victorian, Georgian and medieval eras, with High Spirits I wanted to explore modern history. I was keen to advance Ellie from upper primary age to teenager, and to show how her life had moved on since her accidental altering of history in The Sword of the Spirit. She is now a young adult herself, with a crush on a young man called Luke, and her family situation has been turned on its head.
High Spirits could have told a very different story. I always planned to send Ellie back to Inchwood Manor (where the series began in Childish Spirits), but I was originally going to set the book in the Second World War, with Ellie time-travelling to 1940. There, she would have become mixed up with the evacuees mentioned in Childish Spirits, while being haunted by the ghost of an RAF officer who had been billeted at Inchwood.
A rethink was needed. I realised there had already been many books for young people about evacuees, and I felt there weren’t many ways to make this into a ghost story. Instead I turned to researching the abdication crisis of 1936, and the lives of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. I decided we would not actually meet them, but two shaping-changing ghosts impersonating them sounded like a lot of fun, offering potential for drama as well as humour and social commentary. I felt it would be unusual and original to revisit this period in a YA novel, and since it saw a rise in racism, anti-Semitism and right-wing activity, it seemed a worryingly appropriate subject for today. Young people are taught in schools that the British were the automatic good guys in World War Two, and may not realise how many people in this country in the 1930s supported Hitler. It was a good time to open their eyes.
I kept the RAF officer and made him a ghost from the future, warning of the coming war. Add in Ellie, the other regular characters and Viewpoint, the government’s ghostly watchdog, and we had a story! The threat of a Nazi Britain could also be continued into the final book in the series, The Coming of the Spirits, and it’s here we’ll pick up with Ellie when that book is published.
I’d like to thank the judges of the Georgina Hawtrey-Woore Award, and I hope that children, young adults and older adults will enjoy my book.
Rob’s books are available from www.amazon.co.uk
Learn more about Rob on his website: www.robkeeley.co.uk
Twitter: @RobKeeleyAuthor
http://www.authorhotline.com/robkeeley
Images used with the permission of Robert Keeley