BARDUGO RISING
The prolific creator of the Grishaverse has a Netflix series, ‘Shadow and Bone,’ and a new novel to talk about
When Leigh Bardugo finished “Ruin and Rising,” the third book in her Shadow and Bone trilogy, published in 2014, she wanted a break from the Grishaverse, the Russian-inflected fantasy world that she had been building in her novels.
A billboard changed all that. The Los Angeles-based author didn’t actually want to see what was being advertised — the film “The Monuments Men” — but it got her thinking about “Ocean’s Eleven,” and that generated another idea.
“I had to pull over to the side of the road because I realized that I really wanted to write a fantasy heist,” she recalls during a recent phone call, “and I knew exactly where to set it, and I knew which characters I was going to bring together to try to pull off this impossible job.”
With that revelation, Bardugo fell back into the Grishaverse, where she’s spent a lot of time over the past few years. The fantasy heist concept morphed into her 2015 novel “Six of Crows” and its 2016 follow-up, “Crooked Kingdom.” Three years later, she would embark on another duology, kicking off with the 2019 novel “King of Scars.” That book’s sequel, “Rule of Wolves,” was published Tuesday by Imprint. (Even so, she hasn’t spent all her time there, having authored the adult novel “Ninth House” and a Wonder Woman novel, “Warbringer,” during that time as well.)
The Grishaverse consists of one trilogy, two duologies, a short story collection and the recently published companion book “The Lives of Saints.” Promising even more interest in her work, the Netflix series “Shadow and Bone” is set to premiere April 23, its title taken from the book that launched this young adult fantasy juggernaut.
Back when Bardugo wrote “Shadow and Bone,” though, she had just wanted to finish that one book. “There was no Grishaverse. There was just me trying to write my first book,” she says.
“I had wanted to be a writer for a very long time, but I had no talent for finishing books,” Bardugo recalls. “I would start them, get about 20,000 words in and come to a screeching halt, because I had no idea how to outline a story or what my own process as an author was.”
As she wrote, though, Bardugo took notes for a potential trilogy, although there was no guarantee that her first novel would be published. She didn’t have an agent, didn’t know much about publishing and didn’t have any industry connections. Even after she found an agent, after the book sold, nothing was certain.
“Even if you are lucky enough to sell a trilogy, you don’t know if you’ll ever get to write that whole trilogy,” she says. “I have many friends who had very long arcs planned in multibook series that they never got to write because the first book didn’t perform.”
But “Shadow and Bone” did perform very well. “I’m hesitant to ascribe too much to luck because I think women have a bad habit of doing that,” says Bardugo. “At the same time, there’s no question that I entered the market at the right moment.”
“Shadow and Bone,” released in 2012, hit at a time when fan communities were forming and thriving in online spaces. The book resonated with enough readers who would spread the word about this new fantasy world through the channels that were engaging fans of genre fiction. “I can’t explain why I was fortunate enough for that to happen,” says Bardugo.
Although, she adds, the book likely did benefit from the popularity of YA fiction and the desire for readers, particularly young women, to find books with characters that reflect them and their peers. She also notes that the success of YA, and similarly, romance novels, comes despite the public perception of these markets.
“The two genres that probably take the most flak in literature — they are young adult and romance right now,” she says. Not coincidentally, they are genres that are often written and read by women.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these are genres that provide places for women to express desire and love for adventure, for the opportunity to be placed to heroic roles,” she says.
With her first trilogy set in the Grishaverse, Bardugo says she was “echoing” the stories that she read in her formative years. “It is very much a ‘chosen one’ story,” she explains, using a term that often applies to characters like Katniss Everdeen from “The Hunger Games” or Harry Potter. That concept evolved while writing the “Secret Crows” duology. “I think, in some ways, I was reacting to the idea of a chosen one,” she says. Here, she wanted to focus on the lives of people in this world who were royalty or part of a prophecy.
With the “Nikolai” duology, which concludes with her most recent novel, Bardugo harks back to the characters from the first trilogy, although they have changed with time. “They’re characters who have had to live with the burden of a civil war, of assuming power that, in some ways, is far beyond their years or level of experience, and who are dealing with all of the fallout from these huge world-shaking events that happened in the earlier book,” she says.
Bardugo describes the Grishaverse as being at a “crossroads” right now with the Netflix series premiere on the immediate horizon. “It’s a very strange and exciting and nerve-wracking time,” she says. “I hope a lot of people will discover the book, and I am thrilled by the idea of more people connecting with these characters or these stories, but it’s also absolutely terrifying.”
But, she adds, the series is in good hands. “I’ve once again been very fortunate because I’ve found really remarkable collaborators and creative people to work on this with,” she says. “I know that the adaptation experience can often be a negative one for others, but this has been a really positive one for me.
“The way that I talk about ‘Rule of Wolves’ is as a goodbye for now,” she says. “There are other universes and worlds I want to explore, so I like to leave all the doors open. And I certainly don’t want to write books just for the sake of writing them. I want to feel compelled to tell a story before I tell it. So, anything is possible right now.”