The Will of the Empress by Tamora Pierce

And if I got the chance to act, I came out of my shell then. Teachers and librarians would talk to me because they saw how much I loved to read or how well I could write. I was good at school work, writing, and reading, but not good at making friends, being popular, attracting boys, or talking to strangers. My friends were books, teachers, and librarians. The more we moved when I was a kid, the shyer I got, until most of Q: In your website biography, you call your teen self a geek - did you share Beka's shyness when you were younger? Do you write about isolated young people from personal experience?Ī: Oh, yes. I also knew George just had to have a law dog in the family tree, because irony seems to be his middle name. And my fans have been asking for books from the time of the lady knights in the last ten years. I began to ask myself what if pigeons carried the souls of the murdered dead when I began to find myself among flocks of them when I researched the Daine books back in the early 1990s. I've wondered for a long time (nearly two decades, in fact!) about the vexed relationship between the Provost's Guards and the Court of the Rogue that we only glimpsed in the Alanna books. When did you first consider writing about this Provost's Guard legend, and has her story been simmering for a while?Ī: In many ways, it has. Q: In Beka Cooper, you've gone back in time from Alanna's Song of the Lionness. The author has just released the first book in an exciting, magical new Tortall trilogy: Terrier: Beka Cooper Book 1 begins the story (in first-person narrative) of a legendary Provost's Guardswoman, who lived two centuries before Alanna's time. She and Tim lived in Manhattan but recently moved - with their four cats and two budgies - to Syracuse, New York. Her books (she has over 20 published) won huge popularity through the 90s, continuing into the new millennium. W hile working for a radio production company, Tamora met her spouse of eighteen years, Tim Liebe. In 1983 her first book, Alanna: The First Adventure, was published in hardcover by Atheneum, and she hasn't stopped since.

the fearless, bold, athletic creatures that I was not, but wanted so badly to be.' She studied psychology at university in Philadelphia, planning for a career in social work with teenagers. There, during her parents' divorce, she began to write about ' teenaged girl warriors. Her family lived in California in the 60s. T amora Pierce was born in Pennsylvania in 1954, and grew up with ' plenty of books'. E-interviewed by Hilary Williamson, December 2006

The Will of the Empress by Tamora Pierce