the song of the lioness series by tamora pierce

“But as I grew older, I began to realise that nobody ever goes to the bathroom, nobody ever takes a bath,” she says. Growing up in Pennsylvania and California, she fell for fantasy after a teacher introduced her to Tolkien.

This, says Pierce, has always been a key impetus behind her writing. The original 1980s covers of The Song of the Lioness series. In the 80s and 90s, there wasn’t much fantasy out there that dealt with girls who seemed real, who struggled with the same issues we did. Reading up on her before we speak, I find that most other interviewers also cite her importance in their own lives: I’m not surprised. Back in the pre-internet era, I’d check my university bookshop to see if she had anything new out, and hide it behind the Serious Literature I was meant to be studying.

Whether it was the Lioness novels about Alanna, a girl who trains to be a knight while disguised as a boy, or the Immortals books, which followed the animal-literate girl Daine and her teacher Numair, all her books were hugely important to me growing up. Pierce is probably the author I have most looked forward to interviewing. I am one of those girls for whom it mattered a great deal. “I’ve spent years with girls and their mothers coming up to me and saying ‘thank you so much for including this material’, and it mattered a great deal. Did you ever get an erection in class? Surprisingly, for an author who could be described as fantasy’s Judy Blume, she describes herself as rather reticent. What is it like having a wet dream? she asked. Pierce approached her husband and male friends for insight. I thought: ‘It’s cheating if I ignore it.’” “I had two choices: I could just ignore it as so many writers do or I could do for Arram what I do for my girls. “I’m rather notorious for talking about that,” Pierce says, down the line from her New York home.

The song of the lioness series by tamora pierce