Garth Nix: Beyond the threshold of death

Australian author Garth Nix won both the Best Fantasy Novel and Best Young Adult Novel in the 1995 Aurealis Awards for Sabriel, the first book in a fantasy trilogy for teenagers. Sabriel is being published here this autumn, with an author visit in September; the sequels Lirael and Abhorsen are scheduled for autumn 2003 and 2004.

Nix has been praised by Philip Pullman for imagining "a world with the same solidity as our own, created with invention, clarity and intelligence". Teenage heroine Sabriel lives in a world divided into two kingdoms, a world where the borderline between the land of the living and that of the dead is a scarily permeable one. In a gripping adventure she finds herself having to venture beyond the threshold with death to find her missing father and prevent the dead from returning to wreak havoc in her own land.

"I always want to tell an exciting story. My philosophy with fantasy is to draw upon real things as well as on myths and legends, so that you create a world that seems real to the reader. As long as it feels emotionally real while they are reading the book, it doesn't matter if it doesn't bear very close scrutiny afterwards.

"At one point, Sabriel is pursued through the snow at night by a terrible monster. Now I've never been pursued by a monster, but I am a cross-country skier, so I have skied at night; also I did five years in the army reserve and participated in exercises where you would have that experience of being pursued in the night. You draw on that, adding in the fantastic elements, and because it does have that bedrock of reality, it makes it stronger and more real.

"There are certain elements you can pin down behind the story. For example, I think that the named bells used by Sabriel as part of her magic probably come from a Dorothy Sayers novel where the bells have Latin names. I remember reading that years ago and thinking it was an interesting idea. Similarly, the idea of a wall separating Ancelstierre, which is a kind of 1918 England or Australia, and the Old Kingdom which is a world of magic, probably came from a photograph I saw once of Hadrian's Wall: there was a green lawn on the southern side, and snow on the northern side, so it looked as though there was a different season on either side of the wall.

"For the picture of what happens after you die, I'm drawing on some classical legends, with the rivers of death. There's a lot of myth and folklore involving gateways between life and death, so it's not that big a step to think that death itself could have many stages and thresholds. I hate horror movies, and can't watch them because they live in my head for far too long. But I have to admit that I certainly tend to wander through the darker side of fantasy.

"In terms of reader responses, the character of Mogget the cat [a friendly, talking beast who turns out to have a very sinister side] is up there as one of the favourites. The magical talking animal is almost a stereotype of fantasy, but I was trying to take that element and make it more interesting. Also, it probably reflects how I feel about cats, that they are not to be trusted and you can't predict what they'll do."