Anna Fiteni on how being exposed to Welsh mythology and history inspired her to write The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire

The fire for the ideas that would grow into The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire was probably sparked the night my parents took my sister and I to St Fagan’s Museum for their yearly Halloween celebrations. We went to St Fagan’s almost weekly; it’s a historical park where buildings from Wales’ history are meticulously reconstructed as living museum exhibitions. I grew up running around Tudor farms and Edwardian sweet shops, and participating in Victorian classrooms that came complete with a Welsh Knot. History always felt shockingly present there, but it wasn’t until that Halloween night, bundled up against the cold and stuffed into a supposedly haunted farmhouse to watch a woman in period dress tell us about how our ancestors used to divine the future by candlelight, that I started to pay attention.

Like most writers, I’ve been a reader from the moment I could turn a page by myself, and my favourite genre was always fantasy. Narnia, Percy Jackson, His Dark Materials, you name it, I read it. All those stories took place in worlds far different from my own – the American summer camps of Percy Jackson were particularly mysterious to me. Adventure was a thing that happened elsewhere, until that Halloween, when, for the first time, I learned that we had magic at home. It had always been there, and our mythology and folktales, while often forgotten nowadays, are woven into the DNA of western fantasy. From Tolkein to present day romantasy novels, you can find Welsh names, our language, and creatures born out of our storytelling traditions.

Unfortunately, however, I struggled to find books written by Welsh authors, and when I was living in England for university and would talk about my interest in Welsh history and folklore, many of my peers knew nothing about it. Around that time, feeling homesick, I found myself looking up the old stories I had been so interested in as a kid and learning that there were so many aspects to Welsh mythology and our past that I knew nothing about either. The more I learned, the more I remembered how excited I was years ago, listening to a story told around the fire. I wanted to share my interests by telling a story of my own, one that felt true to the Wales I grew up in, while also being relevant to modern young readers.

Wales is a country where our history feels ever present – walking past a castle on the way to the shops is an almost ubiquitous experience – and though living alongside that past certainly helped me to develop an active imagination, it also made me feel stuck sometimes. That isn’t helped by the many books that take Welsh culture out of context to create old-fashioned fantasy worlds and languages, while failing to acknowledge the root of those ideas, which often leads to an image of Wales – if we’re noticed at all through the pages – as a mystical land of make-believe, rather than a real country, trying to chart it’s path in the twenty-first century. So, while The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire is deeply inspired by my experiences growing up surrounded by Welsh history and mythology, I hope that it also conveys my hopes for Wales’ future.