I interviewed Helen Grant about her novels (The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, The Glass Demon and Wish me Dead) and young adult fiction, a genre that is slowly breaking through in Belgium. The idea behind the interview was to introduce Helen and YA to the Belgian public.I’ve known Helen for a while now and I’ve interviewed her before so I wasn’t particularly nervous about that but, while I was preparing my questions on Friday I started thinking about everything that could go wrong: what if we move too fast (we had an hour to fill), what if she answers multiple question at once and I am left with nothing to say, what if we start repeating ourselves and worst of all, what if it’s not interesting? Luckily, Helen is such a good storyteller that the latter could never be the case but, the other potential problems were all new to me because when you do a private one on one with somebody entertainment value, length and improvisation are never an issue.
In the end we easily filled that hour, I had to skip a few questions and improvise a little but fortunately nobody noticed. I am happy to say that Helen, myself and more importantly the audience had a great time, we had lots of interaction and more than half of them bought one of her novels so we must have done something right.
What I personally loved about doing a live interview was getting the response of the audience, something I hardly ever get with my written texts and interviews because there you are subordinate to your subject. People always remember what the text was about but never who has written it. Sure, occasionally someone will come up to me and say they read or liked my articles but seeing their reactions literaly unfold in front of you is quite something else.
Sadly, not a lot of people showed up. Maybe it’s because it’s the Easter holidays or because the weather is ridiculously good for this time of year or that just not many people are interested in YA in Belgium. Who knows? It was fun and that’s all that matters.
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