Talking to Leigh Bardugo, Fantasy Superstar

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In the world of fantasy fiction, Leigh Bardugo is royalty: Her Grishaverse novels are mainstays on the young adult best-seller list, her “Shadow and Bone” trilogy has been adapted for a Netflix series and her adult novels “Ninth House” and “Hell Bent” established her as a force to reckon with in the subgenre known as dark academia.

Now Bardugo is back with a new fantasy novel, “The Familiar,” and it’s also her first work of historical fiction: Set during the Inquisition in 16th-century Spain, it deals with literal royalty (King Philip II of Spain and Queen Elizabeth of England) through the story of a young scullery maid who happens to possess some magical abilities. This week on the podcast, Gilbert Cruz talks with Bardugo about her career, her writing process and her decision to write a historical novel.

“Yes, there is magic in this book,” Bardugo says. “But the magic is small, and the magic is frequently unrecognized or viewed as fraud. I wanted to see it through the lens of the church of the time. So when I approached this, my first task was to understand the Inquisition. … I wanted the threat of the Inquisition to be pitted against this young woman’s ambition. But I also found this very real historical scandal that had surrounded King Philip and his secretary, Antonio Pérez, who is thought to possibly be the inspiration for one of the characters in Shakespeare’s ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ and this was a murder that Perez orchestrated, and that the king was implicated in. That felt like a really great court scandal to then thrust my heroine into.”

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