Adele Geras has written more than 90 books for children and young adults. She was born in 1944 in Jerusalem, where her family had lived since the late 19th century.

Works inspired by beloved people and objects from her childhood include the story collections Golden Windows and My Grandmother’s Stories and a short novel, The Girls in the Velvet Frame. She has also written A Candle in the Dark, a novel about children of the Kindertransport, and Voyage about Russian Jewish immigrants to New York in the early 20th century. Her father’s work for the Colonial Service led to periods living abroad as a child, including a stay in North Borneo, which inspired Other Echoes. Later she was educated at Roedean and Oxford, and the Happy Ever After trilogy combines the atmosphere of an English boarding school in the 1960s with themes from classic fairy tales. Stories from the ballet and opera have provided source for other works.

Adele Geras has been extremely prolific over the past decade. As well as publishing four novels for adults, she has continued to write for children of all ages. She is one of three authors behind the Historical House series, which reflects the ambitions and hopes of young women through the centuries via the life of one house in Chelsea.

 A series of significant novels for young adult readers have brought classical civilisations to life and explored the relationship between the Greek gods and mortals by telling the story of fictional young people on the fringes of events in Homer and Virgil’s epic works. Following Troy and Ithaka, her latest novel, Dido, tells the story of not only the doomed queen of Carthage but also Dido’s favourite servant Elissa, who shares her mistress’s love for Aeneas, and suffers in secret when he leaves on his mission to found the city of Rome.

In this interview Adele talks to Geraldine Brennan about her approach to writing stories based on the classics.

As in Troy and Ithaka, in Dido the Greek gods behave like humans, moving among the human characters and taking part in the action. How did you arrive at this framework?

My publisher, David Fickling, suggested that I try it when I was writing Troy and, once I did, it was so much fun thinking about what the gods would do and of course what they look like and who they are like.

In Dido, for the first time, I’ve introduced Hera, known to Romans as Juno (although I have used Greek names for consistency with Troy and Ithaka). She is the top goddess, married to Zeus, and clashes with Aphrodite who was a prominent force in the first two books. In my head Hera is the image of Sheila Kitzinger [the natural childbirth expert].

I believe in the Greek gods as much as I believe in any other gods and I often see them at work. During the time of the tsunami in 2003 I was writing Ithaka and heard the news reports of the water being sucked miles out to sea and coming back in an enormous wave. I thought, ‘That’s Poseidon doing that’. I lifted one of those descriptions and put it in the book.

The tragic story of Dido, who burns herself to death when her lover Aeneas leaves Carthage, could be challenging for young readers.

There is only one way this story can end and it is a hideous scene: the conflagration in which Dido builds her own funeral pyre on the bed she shared with Aeneas. I wanted the story to be contained in one location (Dido’s palace) in one night: Dido’s last night, with all the other characters coming to visit her. I used a flashback technique to weave in all the events leading up to her death.

I needed to have some kind of hope going through the front story to offset the tragedy of the back story. As always, I wanted the focus to be on the young people. Troy, Ithaka and Dido are not retellings of Homer and Virgil, they are stories about teenagers doing what they do, falling in love and thinking the world is against them. I write about the people Homer and Virgil left out: the girls, the women, the lower ranking servants, people who just happened to be there when these epic events were going on. In Troy I used three old ladies as well as young people to give their point of view: Homer did not bother about old ladies but they are wonderful repositories of wisdom.

My younger characters are always young people who the reader can imagine being able to cope with what their situation throws at them. So Dido does have an unavoidably grim ending in one respect but, on the other hand, Elissa is expecting her baby, which is always a sign of hope for the future. Elissa will be OK, she’s resourceful. She’ll look after her child and Anna [Dido’s sister] cares about her and will make sure she is all right. I get readers emailing me about Xanthe and Marpesa, the two young women who survive the siege of Troy, asking if they are going to be OK and I always answer, ‘Yes, yes, they’ll be fine, don’t worry’.

Also, I have tried to explain the context for Dido’s suicide which will not be familiar to many modern readers. Aeneas was fated to leave Dido because his destiny was to go and found the city of Rome. When Dido decides to kill herself she’s not doing it in a fit of pique or even because of grief at losing Aeneas, but because she fears for her reputation as a great ruler, that her power and name will be diminished by the loss. That’s not a modern view but it means there is a bigger purpose to the tragedy.

Why is the book called Dido rather than Carthage, given that the story of Elissa is more prominent?

The story of Carthage is not familiar to young people and for people who do know it, the connotations are more to do with the Punic Wars than a love story. Young people have heard of Dido, even if only the pop singer. Her story is an episode in the Aeneid rather than something to do with the city.

Dido’s relationship with Elissa is central to the story. It’s almost that of a mother and daughter. When Dido confronts Elissa over Elissa’s relationship with Aeneas she’s conflicted. She’s very fond of Elissa and she realises it’s not entirely Elissa’s fault, she’s still a child and Aeneas is the one to blame.

How did you manage to convey so many points of view in Dido?

I made a decision at the rewrite stage, guided by David, not to tell any of the story from Dido’s or Aeneas’s point of view. That had widespread implications and it meant that their very famous love scene in the cave in the storm during their hunting expedition had to be conveyed from a voyeur’s point of view. Cubby [a trustworthy but rather slow servant] seemed the right choice for that because he would be sufficiently embarrassed by what he saw to convey the embarrassment the reader might feel at that point. Also, Cubby gets to see Aphrodite, who allows him to forget anything that might trouble him.

I introduced a magic microphone in the form of Hera’s peacock feather, which Elissa and Anna can pick up to overhear Dido and Aeneas’s conversations. It was another way to convey Dido’s experiences, a little more sophisticated than hiding behind a curtain, using a route that was not open to all the characters. Like any royal household, Dido’s palace is full of gossip and intrigue and there is potential for a lot of rumours flying around and many points of view. As usual in my books, the action takes place mostly in the domestic arena: the courtyard, the bedrooms, the kitchen.

The villain of the piece is the poet Iopas, who is a gossip in a sly and malicious way and who tells Dido about Elissa and Aeneas. He’s horrible to Dido’s sister Anna, who loves him, letting her think that he’s the father of Elissa’s child. He’s not a very good poet which serves him right.

Will you explore any more classical themes?

 Yes, if I was convinced that readers wanted it. I would need to be able to use the same family of gods but there are so many possible stories: Theseus, Echo and Narcissus, Pygmalion and so on. I’ve also got an idea for a collection of tales told by Ulysses’ dog for younger children.

Do you do research?

My rule is to read one book for each thing I need to know. For Troy and Ithaka (which is about the women waiting for Odysseus’ homecoming) I read Homer, and for Dido I read Virgil’s Aeneid Book IV. I have been very careful with my cookery in Dido, because soon after Ithaka was published I met a man who said, ‘Did you know there were no lemons in ancient Greece?’. Lemons came much later from the New World. So in Dido’s palace I’ve had to stick to spices and oils.

For Historical House, which I shared with Linda Newbery and Ann Turnbull, we had to be organised and we worked from a floorplan of the house so we all knew where the various rooms were at various stages in the house’s history. For ages I thought the front of the plan was the back and I was worried because there seemed to be no room in the garden for a very significant walnut tree.

But you do draw heavily on personal memories and your books that relate to your childhood and schooling are very vivid and immediate. Do you keep a diary?

I don’t keep diaries: I wish I did. But I’ve got a very good memory for furnishings, curtains and people’s dresses and jewellery. I can still itemise all my teachers’ jewellery from eight years at school. I like writing about all those details and they are the things I want to read about.

My mother’s family were builders, plumbers and brickmakers who came to Jerusalem in the late 19th century. One uncle was a farmer, another exported fruit. I had thousands of cousins and there were lots of family gatherings. My grandmother’s house is very still vivid in my mind and I have used it or details of the furnishings in it many times.

We left after the 1948 war. I remember Jerusalem being besieged when I was four, for long enough for the food to run out. When I came to write about the siege of Troy, I drew on that experience. By 1948 my dad was working for the British Colonial Service Attorney General’s office and after the war he had the option of returning to England. We travelled with him to various colonies between when I was four and when I was 11, mostly to Africa and North Borneo (where I set Other Echoes).

I was at boarding school from 1955 to 1962, travelling to visit my parents in the summer. Until I got married and moved to Manchester, I didn’t know what to say when people asked where I lived. My home has been here for 40 years.

Did you want to be a writer when you were young?

I wanted to be an actress but my parents wanted me to go to university rather than drama school so while I was reading French and Spanish at Oxford I fitted the work between theatrical productions. I was there with an extremely glamorous generation including Maria Aitken and Diana Quick. I’ve written about those years in Yesterday, a series of first-person memoirs by children’s writers edited by Mick Gower for Walker Books. A highlight was being in a very historic production of Alice in Wonderland in Christ Church meadow, and rehearsing in Dean Liddell’s garden.

You’ve been very prolific recently: how do you organise your working day?

I am lazy by nature but I| write very quickly so when I finally sit down to work I am focused and I cover the ground. I spend the morning answering emails, looking at websites and shopping or doing chores, then after lunch I panic because I haven’t written anything although it is stewing in my head all the time. Once I start, I rattle away and write up to 1,500 words with Simon Mayo on the radio in the background. Of course there is nothing to stop me starting work after breakfast, but it’s in my nature to put it off. I print out what I’ve done each evening and amend it ready for the following day to draw me into that day’s work. It mounts up surprisingly quickly. Troy took me nine months to write, Dido far less because it’s shorter. I follow the same schedule every day unless I’m going on a trip, including weekends. I skive off for a while on Sundays to read the forest of newspapers. I could work much harder and when I was writing a fat adult novel a year I would write up to 2,000 words a day, so 1,500 feels like a holiday. I’m working on my next adult novel now and I’ve told myself I must be finished by Christmas, but that seems a long way off.

Thank you Adele Geras for talking to Write Away

Geraldine Brennan is a journalist and editorial consultant specialising in children's books. Former books editor of The Times Educational Supplement, she has reviewed teen fiction for the Observer and judged several literary awards, most recently the Frances Lincoln Diverse Voices Children's Book Award.

2009-07-16