10/28/2025
Pub day interview! We at Subterranean are big fans of Alix E. Harrow’s writing. Not only is she a New York Times-bestselling and Hugo Award-winning author, she’s also a terrific interview, so we were very pleased that she agreed to answer some questions from writer Kat Howard about her spectacular new novel The Everlasting, which is being published today.
Kat Howard: The Everlasting is, among other things, a story about stories. What were some of the stories and legends that you used as inspiration in crafting this novel?
Alix Harrow: It’s fundamentally cringe to write stories about stories. I want everyone to know that I know that. It’s like when Hollywood makes a movie about the magic of movies. Yuck! Eyeroll! And yet! Here I am.
The influences for this one are obvious, I think: lots of Arthuriana, some Joan of Arc, and all the watered-down fifth-hand variations of both. I think Quest for Camelot was about as influential as T.H. White, honestly, because the book ended up being much more concerned with the deployment of folklore than its origins.
KH: I love a good epigraph, and the Rilke poem that serves as your epigraph feels particularly apt. Did you know the poem before you started writing the book? How did you come to choose it?
AH: Oh, I’m so glad you asked about the Rilke poem. Not because I have an especially mystical answer—I just read a bunch of Shirley Jackson essays and I’m jealous of all her portents and superstitions—but because I love that poem so much. I was halfway through my draft when I saw a few lines pop up on some Instagram poetry account. I googled the rest of it and sort of shivered all over, like a dog. I’ve never had an epigraph before, but suddenly I did.
KH: Academia and scholarly research are often key pieces of your writing. What about them makes them useful for you as fictional tools?
AH: I think most novels need their main character to find out new information which changes their perspective on events, and this is very conveniently the same arc as your average grad student. I also think I have a problem where the “plot” of the book is balanced precariously on several generations of history, which I have to impart to the reader in a way that isn’t too tedious. Libraries are often handy—archives, knowledgeable professors, old newspapers. At least this one doesn’t have a wiki page.
KH: There are many recent and upcoming releases featuring lady knights as featured characters. An excellent time for women with swords! Why do you think this theme has arisen?
AH: I’ve been thinking about this, too, given how many of my friends and colleagues have absolutely banging lady knight books coming out! I don’t think it’s coincidental that The Green Knight came out a couple of years ago, or that all the Tamora Pierce millennials are writing their third or fourth books right now--but of course there’s more to it. I think medievalism is a cyclical disease which reemerges in dark and uncertain times as a comforting fantasy: that there are kings worth serving, that justice and nobility will prevail, that magic is real. It’s the language of fairy tale, which we need most when the world is at its—ha—grimmest.
But there’s also something interesting about the gendered specificity of the lady knight trend! David M. Perry, the historian, has a recent article where he describes the aesthetic of the lady knight as a playful answer to the trad-wife. If we’re going to play historical dress-up, we ought to at least get a sword out of it.
KH: One of your characters says that “a nation is a story that we tell about ourselves.” Ideas of nationhood and politics are extremely important in this book. And I know I have felt it is a more apt book for our current time each time I have read it. Yet, we also see people who want their artists to be political blank slates. How do you feel art—either yours in specific or art in general—relates to politics?
AH: I don’t really think of art as something separate from politics, except on those baffling occasions when someone complains in my DMs. Making art is about communicating your vision of the world—saying “this is how it feels to me,” to steal Ishiguro’s line—and how you see the world is deeply, necessarily, obviously political. The reason this book is about the violent, cyclical maintenance of national mythologies is because I’ve been living it! So have you! There are plaques disappearing from museums, signs vanishing from national parks, curriculum edited, departments defunded. Manipulating history to control the future is the least fantastic part of this book.
KH: The Everlasting has a deeply complex looping structure. What were some of the more challenging or unexpected parts of writing this book?
AH: It was—and I can say this now with humor, and even affection—an absolute nightmare to write. I’m a person who tends to revise constantly as I go, which is probably not very efficient at the best of times, but when you have a repeating series of looped events, so that every small alteration has to be chased down in every version of the scene??? If I had a loved one considering writing a time loop novel I would physically restrain them.
KH: Are there any other projects that you’d like to bring to our readers’ attention?
AH: Since we’ve already mentioned them, I’d love to mention all the other wonderful lady knight books coming out this year, including Tasha Suri’s The Isle in the Silver Sea, Rachel Gillig’s The Knight and the Moth, Tori Bovalino’s The Second Death of Locke, and Caitlin Starling’s The Starving Saints. They’re all genuinely excellent.
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Get your copy of The Everlasting wherever books are sold: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250799081/theeverlasting/
