Samantha Shannon on ‘A Day of Fallen Night’: ‘Fantasy is the genre of possibility’

Samantha Shannon says the genre allows one to engage with history and can be used as a way to effectively mirror and explore events in the real world

Samantha Shannon’s high fantasy novel, The Priory of the Orange Tree(2019), rife with her trademark strong women characters, vivid world-building and dragons, was supposed to be a standalone novel till A Day of Fallen Night (Bloomsbury) came out earlier this year.  

“Well, they are both still standalone and self contained,” Samantha says over a video call from her apartment in London. “The two stories are designed to stand separately. With Priory, I was telling about events that happened thousand years after the dragon came out of a volcano.”

To build a rich history for this world, Samantha says she had to fill in events of the 1,000 years in her mind. “I ended up talking about this event that happened 500 years ago, called the Grief of Ages. The more I thought about it, and the more I mentioned historical figures that were associated with this period, the more fascinated I became. Eventually, I thought if I were to go back centuries, so readers don’t necessarily have to have read Priory, there might be an interesting story to tell.

Fallen Night can be looked at as a prequel to Priory, the 31-year-old author says. “It was an interesting challenge for me as an author to build the same world, but 500 years earlier. I had to think about how each country would be the same but different. It is a completely different cast of characters. There are a couple of cameos from long lived or immortal characters, which was quite fun (laughs).

The world of the Priory grew from Samantha’s intention to re-imagine the legend of St. George and the Dragon. “It is the story of a damsel in distress being rescued from a dragon by a knight. I was interested in it and ended up researching the origins of the story. I found so many surprising details. For example, in one version of the story, St. George fights the dragon underneath an enchanted orange tree.”

That detail got Samantha wondering about the magical orange tree. “I decided that the orange tree would have to be associated with fire in some way, and that its roots would go right down into the fire and the core of the world from where it would draw up fire magic.”

Dragons, Samantha says have an important place in our collective consciousness. “Most cultures have some kind of take on the dragon or the celestial serpent throughout history. They are the ultimate representation of magic.”