Goodreads asked Scott D. Pomfret:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Scott D. Pomfret The idea for The Hunger Man came to me about 15 years ago, when I read The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham-Smith, the most popular if not the best account of the potato blight and famine that struck Ireland in the years 1845-50. As a child of the Irish Catholic diaspora (albeit much, much later than famine times), I was outraged by the British role in exacerbating the tragedy. I toyed with this story on-again, off-again for years, but only found the right voices in 2014 while reading a book of Irish fairy tales. From that point on, I read every last book I could find on famine history and Irish fairy tales to create the "faerie realism" that drives The Hunger Man (the title obviously an allusion to Woodham-Smith).

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