James Spinella asked Francesca Haig:

I first wanted to say that I thoroughly enjoyed The Fire Sermon. It was a pleasant surprise to see how you were able to bring such originality to the genre. Furthermore, your poetic voice is rich with haunting and beautiful images that truly capture the dark, yet hopeful landscape of a post-apocalyptic world. So, what prompted you to write a Post-Apocalyptic novel?

Francesca Haig Thanks for your kind words, James - delighted that you enjoyed The Fire Sermon, and particularly glad that you enjoyed the imagery. As for the question of what prompted me to write a post-apocalyptic novel: there's no straightforward answer. People have been drawn to post-apocalyptic scenarios since stories began (it goes back to Noah, and even earlier). I suspect that part of the appeal is that we get to ask ourselves the juicy big questions about how society works, and how we might behave if we landed in the world that we created. And the sad truth is that the environmental disaster that we're racing towards makes apocalyptic scenarios seem ever more relevant. On a more personal level, I think that I was also influenced by my research as an academic: I specialised in Holocaust literature, so perhaps it's inevitable that when I wrote my first novel it would turn out to be very dystopian. I also think that Cormac McCarthy's The Road (one of my all-time favourite novels) was a big influence.

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