Creating her worlds from writing haven
A rather neat and tidy desk with a view of Nelson Haven’s tidal estuary is Christine Leunens’ writing spot.
The international author’s home in Nelson, where she lives with her husband and three sons, feels spacious despite every nook and cranny being packed with books.
She spends a considerable amount of time behind her desk in the master bedroom, but only notices the landscape outside during the few moments she looks up.
Focused entirely on the world she’s creating and the characters within it, Leunens spends up to 50 hours a week writing and editing towards the end of the writing process.
Leunens has been a novelist for 20 years, with her first book Primordial Soup published in Britain in 1999. Her second book, called Caged Skies, is seen through the eyes of Johannes, an avid member of the Hitler Youth in the 1940s.
He discovers his parents are hiding a Jewish girl called Elsa behind a false wall in their large house in Vienna. His initial horror turns into interest, then love and obsession.
The book, which was published in 2008, is currently being turned into a movie by Fox Searchlight with New Zealander Taika Waititi as its director. It’s due to premiere by the end of the year.
Leunens said she never thought she would have one of her books made into a movie.
‘‘You could have knocked me down with a feather, because I didn’t see that coming.
‘‘It’s a funny novel because it has come along slowly and now it’s [translated] in 60 languages.’’
Leunens said she thought Caged Skies seemed more relevant now than when it came out, given the change in the political climate that occurred after Brexit, Donald Trump becoming the president of the United States and the growing refugee crisis.
‘‘A lot of countries where there’s conflict now, it’s places where [people] said, this could never happen again, and suddenly see there’s the far right coming back again and realise it doesn’t take as much as people think for the fear factor to play.
‘‘That to me is quite interesting. I feel like I wrote something a long time ago and then the characters took on a life of their own and the book is like a kid, it’s going [its] own way.’’
You could have knocked me down with a feather. Christine Leunens
Leunens said a child once asked her if writing made her happy.
‘‘I really had to think a while, and I said, well actually sometimes it give me some pain but when it’s done you feel a sense of [relief].’’
Leunens was born in Hartford, Connecticut, to an Italian mother and a Belgian father.
She spent her younger years between the United States and Belgium before moving to France as a teenager.
She spent many years as an international model for the likes of Givenchy, Paco Rabanne, Nina Ricci, Pierre Balmain and Sonia Rykiel, before focusing solely on writing.
Leunens said she could spend as many as four years writing one novel.
At the beginning of the process she only writes about six hours a day, when she puts her dream-like ideas onto paper.
‘‘Sometimes only after five hours I don’t even see clear or know whether it’s good or bad anymore. I just leave it, and then the next day I come to it fresh.
‘‘I like the very end where I start to think, OK, this now starts to sound like I’ve done something.’’
She’s several weeks away from finishing her as-yet untitled fourth book, a historical FrancoNew Zealand novel.