BIG INTERVIEW

Susan Elkin caught up with well-travelled author and journalist Ellen Alpsten to discuss her life’s journey and inspiration for the Tsarina trilogy.

So how does a woman who is German by birth but grew up in Kenya and now lives in West London get steeped in Russian history? It’s a long story. Ellen Alpsten, 50, and I meet on the ground floor at Tate Modern where her youngest son, Gustav is enjoying a flamboyant playground area set up for the summer holidays in the Turbine

Hall. She keeps an eye on him as we chat over hot drinks at the pop-up coffee bar and after a while he joins us. Aged 11, he tells me that onomatopoeia is over used, that he enjoys his ballet class, is looking forward to secondary school next term and wonders how I manage to talk, listen and write notes simultaneously. It’s all very congenial.

Ellen’s new novel The Tsarina’s Daughter was published this summer and is a sequel to Tsarina published last year and recently out in paperback. She is working (“about 50 pages or 10% in”) on the next which will be called Becoming Tsarina and tells me, eyes shining with enthusiasm and warmth, that it will eventually be a quartet. The first novel has been translated into 70 languages and has sold worldwide.

That means she has spent, and is spending, a great deal of time in, and emotional energy on, eighteenth century Russia where the lead character in her latest novel is the daughter of Peter the Great. So where did this interest start?

“My father grew up in East Germany under Soviet rule finally escaping to the West when he was sixteen in 1956 so that he could get higher

education. It means that his experience – and the long, long complicated relationship between Germany and Russia is, in a sense, in my background” says Ellen, pointing out that it’s important to distinguish between the Russians and the Soviets.

In time Ellen’s father became a vet and went to Kenya to work on a (successful) German government vaccination programme to restore wildebeest numbers after foot and mouth disease, taking his family with him. “I went to a tea pickers’ school. We had no TV but there were book parcels from Germany, pets and lots of story telling which is a massive tradition in Africa,” recalls Ellen, telling me it was all very formative and that she didn’t care for it when the family moved back to Germany to a village with more cattle than people. When she was eighteen, she went to L’Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris for a degree similar to the British PPE. “I was two years ahead of Emmanuel Macron” she grins adding that, despite having studied politics, she definitely didn’t want to be a politician.

I stop her there. That means she must speak at least three languages. “Oh yes” she says nonchalantly. “I speak a bit of Swedish too because my husband, whom I met in Paris, is a Swede, the family name ‘Alpsten’ is Swedish.”

I’m curious to know when this polyglot started visiting Russia and am surprised to learn that she has been only once.

“My husband and I backpacked to St Petersburg before our three sons were born. It was very memorable because people were so warm and welcoming. We were invited, for instance, to see someone’s flat which was a small part of a former aristocratic palace. It’s quite common for 50 people to share a single loo. When a Russian does well in, say the Olympics, my father always says bitterly: ‘Lucky chap. He’ll get his own loo now’.“

Ellen researches in ways other than visiting sites. “I read for about a year before I started the first novel – lots of Russian classics, non-fiction books and Russian fairy tales which tend to be very dark. The spiritual world is malevolent in their folklore. Maybe that has evolved from the brief summers and long winters. And the reading sometimes throws up interesting things. For instance, I found a haunted ravine near my heroine’s birthplace which gave me the idea for the supernatural element in The Tsarina’s Daughter.”

After graduation in Paris,

Ellen came to Britain for her first job on magazine – where she wrote her first novel in office time. “I wasn’t very good at the job. I’m not much of a team player” she says. Then she did a course in public relations and worked in marketing at Bloomberg TV in London.

Once her children arrived (her two older sons are now 17 and 16), Ellen went freelance as a journalist (Vogue, Standpoint, Conde Nast Traveller) and author while her husband built up his healthcare company. “I published 22 novels in Germany – historical fiction, one about Shakespeare and children’s books – but because Tsarina was my first book in English it was presented by Bloomsbury as a ‘debut’ novel,” she explains.

Passion for the Russia she writes about beams out of Ellen. “Yes, I love Lizenka, Elizabeth Petrovna Romanova, my heroine whose experiences are in some ways similar to her namesake Elizabeth 1’s in Britain. Both had to live through the reign of a deeply hostile female relative before acceding, for example.” She adds “And it was her popularity that swept her to the throne. She was the first People’s Princess.”

Two other things leapt off the page at me when I read The Tsarina’s Daughter so I ask Ellen about the casual cruelty – such as being condemned to having your tongue ripped out but being able to bribe the torturer to leave part of it, for example. “Appallingly, it’s all well documented” says Ellen, mentioning also the princess who was sent to live in a convent where she was cooped like an animal in filth or the nobleman who was caged and forced to live like a bird for many years.

I’m also fascinated by the apparent facility with which these Russian rulers had relationships with commoners – and not the middle classes, either, but shepherds and the like. “Yes, it’s very interesting isn’t it?” agrees Ellen. “Once Lizenka takes up with Alexis he simply wants to be with her and she with him. He is not interested in her status as tsarina.”

She goes on to point out that

“My father grew up in East Germany under Soviet rule finally escaping to the West when he was sixteen”

Lizenka’s mother’s story was very much rags to riches while hers is riches to rags and back again. Fortunes changed very quickly in this volatile world. I point out that this history isn’t very well known in Britain. “These people have always been there” says Ellen “They were hidden in plain sight. I honestly think they were waiting for me. I’m destined!”

So how does Ellen organise her work?

“Well, it’s a job isn’t it? Once the children are sorted, I sit down at the computer around 9.30 and work until 2.30. I do my emails first and then aim to write 2000 words a day – always starting by reading through the previous day’s work.”

Ellen believes passionately in the importance of the opening sentence. “It has to be a summary of the novel and tantalising enough to draw the reader in to want to read on” she says.

Of course, there’s more to Ellen than her novels. Somehow the conversation then turns to Ellen’s labrador who recently had a litter of seven beautiful puppies after an arranged love-at-firstsight playdate. She shows me photographs on her phone and quips that, at home in Richmond, she has an alternative career as a dog breeder. She is also an occasional carer. Her father, once a keen hunter and a very proud man, is now frail and in need of help at home in Germany, but it hasn’t been possible to get there until now so Ellen is soon going out there to assist her brother for a short time.

With that, we go our separate ways.

Ellen and Gustav are going to have a quick look round one of the Tate Britain exhibitions and then have lunch – good company, both of them. He already writes…

“They were hidden in plain sight. I honestly think they were waiting for me. I’m destined!”