Here be dragons and hobbits.

A few days ago, I was asked what sort of books I write. As always, I ducked my head, became a bit flustered, and muttered ‘stuff about magic’. I don’t know why this is still my response when it comes to talking about the stories I enjoy. Not just writing, but reading as well.

And I’ve always enjoyed it. When I was 3, I threw a tantrum over a dragon book I spotted in a Swansea shop. Growing up, I loved films like The Last Unicorn, and TV programmes like He-Man and She-Ra. The plot of Swan Lake fascinated me, and as a teen, I favoured books about vampires and witches over real world stories.

One day, I discovered a copy of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings among my parents’ books and I read the famous lines regarding the one ring.

One ring to rule them all, One ring to find them,

One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.

In the land of Mordor where the shadows lie.

And I was caught. My first thought was, ‘that is so cool’, swiftly followed by ‘I want to write something like that!’ Yet, when I was a kid, fantasy was still considered geeky and looked down on in the literary world. Even Terry Pratchett was once asked, ‘why fantasy?’ His interviewer actually said ‘you’re so good, you could write anything. Why write fantasy?’ Despite Pratchett pointing out that his books were regularly in the UK’s book top 10, the interviewer said that fantasy is ‘regarded as less than serious fiction’.

Maybe this perception is where my continued shyness comes from. What’s a grown woman doing writing about magic and dragons? Books aimed, not at children, which would be a more acceptable form of fantasy, but for an adult audience (and I don’t mean adult in the smutty way, though there is romance in there).

Why though? As Pratchett points out in his interview, fantasy was probably one of the earliest forms of storytelling. It’s been around for centuries. There’s Beowulf, the Mabinogion, stories about gods and goddesses. More recently, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, Gulliver’s Travels, fairy tales that are told and retold in different forms. Star Wars is essentially fantasy in space. Replace Jedi with wizards, and spaceships with horses and you have yourself a fantasy story, complete with a farm boy protagonist, a mentor, a princess, loveable sidekicks, and a dark lord.

And there’s such a range of it. It’s the genre where all other genres can meet. Romance, mystery, political thriller, cosy. You name it, there’s a fantasy book that you may enjoy because in fantasy you take elements of the known world and weave it together with something extraordinary. There is magic in being able to do that.

Tolkien’s work, for instance, deals with themes of death, friendship, forgiveness, redemption, and the corrupting influence of power, while Pratchett’s books look at various aspects of human experience, blending it with magic and humour.

Fantasy is continuing to grow. When The Fellowship of the Ring came out in 2001, it was a huge boost to the fantasy genre while TV series such as Game of Thrones, The Wheel of Time and Dune, have brought fantasy into the mainstream, attracting new followers. It is one of the most popular genres of books among readers after romance and crime/thrillers.

So why fantasy for me? To escape, to get to live countless lives, doing exciting things I could never dream of doing, to know that good vanquishes evil and the monsters can be defeated, to know that there is a hero in all of us, no matter how small or insignificant we may feel. Because, ‘those who don’t believe in magic will never find it’ (Roald Dahl).

Maybe the next time I’m asked what I write about, I will confidently proclaim that I am a fantasy author, who writes about love and friendship and, of course, magic.

Esme Clarke is from a small town in South Wales, UK. She has always been passionate about writing, and started scribbling vampire stories and historical romances in every notebook she could find at 13. In 1999, she moved to London to study Medicine at Kings College, but continued writing as a hobby. It was while living in Nunhead that the first seeds of the Shadows of Ellevor were born.

Fast forward to 2018, and Esme made the scary decision to hang up her stethoscope and start writing full time. Since then, she has written the first two books of her debut fantasy series, The Shadows of Ellevor, and outlined the first drafts of the final three. When not writing, she can be found racing around on the school run, playing Wordle, and trying to stop her cat, Luna, from eating all her pens.

You can contact Esme through her website: https://www.esmeclarkeauthor.com/

and follow her on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/esmeclarkewriter

Esme's first book, The Last Oath, is available here.