Lucy Christopher was born in Wales but grew up in Australia, living in Melbourne from the age of nine, until the end of her Undergraduate degree at Melbourne University. As a child, she loved camping in the bush and exploring the overgrown creek at the back of her house. Each Christmas she was hoisted back to Wales for a dose of family and cold weather. After various attempts at being an actor, a coffee maker, a waitress and a nature guide, she moved back to the UK to earn a distinction in a Creative Writing MA from Bath Spa University.
She is currently undertaking a PhD with Bath Spa University to explore the ways that Australian literature represents wild places, particularly in its writing for young adults. Lucy’s debut novel, Stolen, was written as part of this PhD. It explores her thoughts about the Australian desert in the story of a teenage girl who is kidnapped and taken there.
In Stolen, 16-year-old Gemma writes a moving letter to her captor, Ty, a troubled young man. Ty has brought Gemma to the wild and desolate Australian Outback, and she reflects on a landscape from which there’s no escape. In a story of survival, passion and darkness, Gemma reveals how she had to deal with the nightmare, or die trying to fight it. John Marsden calls it a ‘stunning, scary and beautiful book’.
GR caught up with Lucy recently and asked her about her inspirations for Stolen.

GR: When did you realise you wanted to be a writer?
LC: I’ve always been good at writing; always writing stories for projects at school and getting good marks for English; but I never properly considered a career in writing until after I finished my undergraduate degree in Creative Arts at Melbourne University. After Uni, I tried to be an actor for a while but didn’t have much success. It was only when I looked back at my good marks in creative writing while at university and at my pretty ordinary ones for acting and theatre studies, that I decided that I better just stick to what I’m good at! So I enrolled in an MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and moved to the UK to begin my writing adventure!

GR: Is there any particular significance of the title, Stolen?
LC: I thought long and hard about using ‘Stolen’ as a title. Obviously the word ‘stolen’ has huge connotations in Australia and I was initially concerned that Australian readers may think the book was about the Stolen Generation, which it’s not. However, the book is about similar issues that may be associated with the Stolen Generation’s trauma; those of belonging and being forcibly removed from a childhood landscape ... the idea of a person being displaced within an Australian landscape. And there is an allegorical link to the Stolen Generation. When Gemma says that ‘they kind of stole you too’ she is linking Ty’s childhood experience of being stolen by the authorities to her own experience of being stolen by Ty, and yet she is inadvertently linking Ty’s experience to the forcible removal of the Stolen Generation from the Great Sandy Desert.
However, both of my characters are actually European imports and not distinctly aboriginal (though Ty does display an affinity and respect for the Walmajarri [people] that he grew up with). In this sense, I wanted to explore the idea of being both attached to and estranged from landscape from an Anglo-Australian perspective. I wanted to think deeper about the issues of being forced from and pulled towards this ‘interior’ Australian landscape, and, probably because I am also from European-Australian descent, I wanted to explore this from a viewpoint not distinctly Aboriginal. I wanted my novel to explore the psychological feelings that go with forced removal from and longing for a place, rather than the legalities of a political act. I am actually quite intrigued as to how the title of this book is received by Australian readers.

GR: Why did you choose to set the majority of this novel in the Australian Outback?
LC: For so many reasons! Firstly, because I love it and I have been writing about this landscape on and off for about ten years now. In fact the very first novel I started writing was set in the Australian desert (though I never finished that one!). It's just such an amazing landscape – huge yet delicate, terrifying yet restorative, dangerous yet spiritual. It's also a landscape that provokes extreme cultural reactions: it's been vilified as a 'horrorscape' by the media (a place where backpackers get murdered, explorers perish or dingoes steal babies) and it's also an extremely spiritual place. I've always been fascinated by its extremes. In order to mirror and explore further this extreme landscape, I thought it would be interesting to write about an extreme situation occurring within it. So I started thinking – what would be the most extreme situation I could put into this landscape? Kidnapping? But it couldn't be any ordinary kidnapping where it was clear what was right and what was wrong. It had to be a kidnapping of extremes too: A kidnapping where the boundaries between love and obsession, fear and restoration had to be blurred ... thus echoing wider mixed feelings about this land.
And from a purely selfish point of view, I wanted an excuse to be able to hire a 4WD and trek through this landscape and explore it myself!

GR: Can you talk about any memories of your childhood holidays camping in Australia that influenced parts or scenes or imagery of your book?
LC: My favourite childhood memories are from camping in the Australian bush. Emigrating from a small Welsh border town when I was nine years old, the Australian landscape seemed incredibly dangerous and exciting to me ... and all my first few experiences I had in it stand out vividly in my memory. Everything about this landscape was different; the birds were ruder, the trees rustled more and the sky was both darker and brighter than anything I’d ever experienced. This new country fascinated me as much as it scared me, and in that sense, Gemma’s thoughts about her new landscape are probably also my own early thoughts that I had while camping in the bush. I can remember the thrill of seeing a brown snake curled up on a path while bushwalking and the shiver from dipping my fingers into rockpool ripples. I also remember being strongly affected by the colours and sensations of my first trip to the ‘red centre’.

GR: If Stolen was a movie, who would you like to see play Ty and Gemma?
LC: I’d love Stolen to be a movie! When I write, I think in images so I can clearly see the book playing out as a film in my head. If I could change the past and bring back the wonderful Heath Ledger, he would have made a good Ty. As for Gemma, I think she looks a little bit like a mixture between the actresses Evan Rachel Wood and Kristen Stewart ... though we would obviously have to find a British version!

GR: Was there an incident or news story that inspired Stolen? Or did you write it more so that you could explore the Australian Outback in literature?
LC: I have to say that the idea came completely from the setting! There was no particular incident or news story that inspired the book, although many relevant ones were around when I started writing.
I have always been interested in exploring how the Australian desert has been written about in books for young people, and I wanted to contribute to this canon of sorts by writing my own book set in the desert. I didn’t write Stolen because I love horror narratives (quite the opposite – they scare me silly!) but because I wanted to explore the different images that the Australian desert has in fiction – that of being a ‘horror-scape’ and yet also a place of beauty and spiritual significance. Having felt both wonder and fear about the Australian desert when I went to visit it myself, I wanted to think more deeply about what this amazing landscape really meant to me and about what it could mean to other young people.
The abduction cases of Madeleine McCann and Natascha Kampusch were only interesting and useful for me to refer to once I had begun work on the basic narrative.

GR: Why is it interesting to you to explore a young person’s experience in conjunction with wild places?
LC: This is interesting for me because, like I said earlier, all of my strongest memories from childhood occurred in wild places.
For me, my sense of ‘home’ is all about plants and animals and being outside. I also think my early experiences of wild places helped to develop a lasting respect for nature as well as simultaneously increasing my confidence (from being quite a shy, Welsh child to becoming a brasher more Aussie one!) I think young people need wild places in order to develop their sense of home and their sense of self.
In my PhD in Creative Writing (of which Stolen was a part), I am looking at how other authors write about Australian arid landscape and for what purpose. I am interested to see how authors use wild Australian settings to talk about themes of identity and belonging.

GR: How difficult was it to make the character Ty, the kidnapper, somewhat sympathetic?
LC: Not all that difficult. One reading of Ty is as a human embodiment of the Australian desert and, in that sense, it was easy to make him sympathetic (as I love the desert!). The harder thing for me was making it come across that he hadn’t done a good thing by kidnapping Gemma. The ending I first wrote for this novel was radically different to the ending we have now and to some degree, it let Ty off the hook. I had to realise that it may not be morally sound for me to write a book like this for young people and therefore, Ty had to change as a character throughout the book and become less sympathetic.

GR: Why did you choose to tell the story in the form of a letter?
LC: I knew right from the beginning that I wanted to write the book in the style of a letter from Gemma to Ty. In fact, the first line of the book, ‘You saw me before I saw you’ was the very first line I ever wrote of this book. And it stayed there, like that, the very first line in the first chapter. I knew I needed a style that was intimate and emotional and intense, and a style that would grab the reader from the first page ... the letter form seemed to fit this perfectly. Besides all this, the narrative style was really easy for me to write. This is probably because I used to write reams of letters myself, as a teenager, and kept a regular diary – I’d had lots of practice in the form of letter writing from a teenage voice!

GR: Tell us about the kids’ wildlife group you run.
LC: Well, unfortunately I don’t run this anymore, as I no longer have enough time, though I am still involved with it. The group is called the Newport Wetlands Wildlife Explorer’s Group and it meets one Saturday a month at a local nature reserve. It’s for kids aged between eight and 12 years old and we do all sorts of fun stuff, like making areas for wildlife, nature walks, making dens and creative activities. I used to be an Educational Guide at this reserve and I would take loads of school kids through this reserve to show them its wildlife ... and these kids all wanted to come back! The reserve is in a densely populated and rather poor city in South Wales called Newport. Consequently, for the children who visit, it is often their first experience of going to a nature reserve. It’s an amazing feeling to be able to show a child a mini-beast for the first time or to watch their eyes widen as a flock of swans whirr overhead. And I guess that’s what I’ve been coming back to again and again through this interview – wild places are important and magical and are brilliant to write about. I try to show young people this whenever I can.

Stolen by Lucy Chrisopher is published by The Chicken House, rrp $17.99.

Stolen was such an amazing book, and one of the first I haven't been able to put down in ages.Lucy creates the Australian desert so accurately and vividly it's like I'm back there again myself.

Oh and she was lying when she says she was a terrible actor - I did a Theatre Course and Acted with her and stage and she was amazing at that too!