Spotlight On Justin Hill’s Original Fiction

You might be familiar with Justin Hill for his Black Library fiction (written as Justin D. Hill), but outside of the worlds of Warhammer he has a considerable backlog of original work too, all exploring various aspects of contemporary and historical fiction. His seven books cover all manner of periods and locations from 11th century England to 20th century Eritrea, and characters from Viking kings to Chinese poets. As part of an ongoing series of guest posts in which I invite authors onto the site to tell us about their original fiction, Justin is here to talk a little bit about each of his novels, what inspired each of them, and what went into their writing. The stories behind these books are fascinating, featuring rapid evacuations, overseas volunteering, meeting the descendents of royalty and more, so settle in to add some books to your TBR list!

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Justin Hill: I can pinpoint the moment I stopped wanting to be a fireman, and decided I wanted to be an author. I was ten, and I had finished the last page of Return of the King and felt a profound sense of loss. I was spellbound, and the magic of the story had come to an end, and it crushed me. I couldn’t believe a made up world could feel so real, that the lives of fantasy characters could be so compelling. I thought, ‘When I grow up, I want to do that as well.’ I didn’t know any authors, and had no idea how to become a writer. My parents were both teachers, and all the family friends were teachers as well, and the career room at my school was a dusty alcove with leaflets on law, the civil service and management consultancy; and my school seemed to be full of the sons of pig farmers or lawyers.

My only opening was the writers I heard on the radio. They all seemed to go abroad, and lived in poverty until they were 39, when they became published and successful. It sounds daft, but that, essentially, was my plan. So, at the age of twenty one I found myself in rural Shanxi, on the north Chinese plain, working for a British volunteer organisation, sharing a flat with a Spaniard, and teaching English at a rural Chinese university.

We were as isolated as you could be. The internet had not yet happened, there was no telephone, the TV was all Chinese soap-operas and Communist Party propaganda, all communication with my family was by the weekly letter I wrote – and the nearest other foreigner was twelve hours away by bus.….

It was the perfect place to learn to write.

Shieldwall

Everyone has heard of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, no one has heard of the Danish conquest that happened fifty years earlier, in 1016. But you couldn’t tell the story of 1066 without explaining the other conquest. Shieldwall sets out that tale, starting during the reign of Ethelred the Unready, when King Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon England is torn apart by civil ruptures and Viking attacks. It features one of my favourite English kings no one has ever heard of, Edmund Ironside, as seen through the eyes of Godwin, the main character. (It’s Godwin’s son, Harold Godwinson, who dies at the Battle of Hastings. But, of course, none of them know that yet….) It has one of my favourite beginnings to any of my novels, that I can still recite word for word, partly because it took me five years to write…. And it was a Sunday Times Book of the Year, which was great.

Viking Fire

I think that technically, this is my most accomplished novel. It’s also the life story of the last great – possibly greatest – Viking: Harald Hardrada, and certainly one of the most interesting men of the middle ages. If he wasn’t a Viking he’d be so much better known. His story reads like a real-life Conan the Barbarian, and if you were a betting man in 1066, all the sane money was on Hardrada ending the year as king of England. His story spans the whole of Christendom, from Sicily to Norway, and the whole of modern Ukraine as well, taking in the empress of Constantinople, and Kievan princesses as well. Poet, reformer, warrior – I think of Hardrada as a renaissance prince long before his time. His story is so extraordinary it reads like fiction…

I finished this a few months before the 950th anniversary of the Battle of Stamford Bridge, where he was killed. I was invited along, and I heard that one of his descendants was going to be there. Having spent so much imaginative time with Harald Hardrada as a character, my greatest fear was that his descendant would be a weedy, academic type, but when I met Gunner ‘Viking’ Olafsson, I was delighted. His grandfather was Mr Universe, and Gunnar was one of the bodyguards of Gorbachov during the Reykavik Summits, and was a giant of a man. And he showed me his genealogy (Iceland was the kind of place there wasn’t much else to do but list genealogies through the long winters…), being descended not only from Harald Hardrada, but also from the great poet, and hero of his own saga, Egil Skallagrimson. (This book is really called The Last Viking, but a year before this was published, another author published a novel with that title… and I never found a better title. But so you long as you know!)

The Drink and Dream Teahouse

There was a time when I looked back on each novel a bit like looking back on an old girlfriend. They all had great moments, but some were hard work, some just appeared, and some were ill-fated from the start. But this one was my first novel, and it had all the passion and intensity of young love. Writing it was glorious, but if it had gone on much longer I think I would have gone a bit mad…

I had a Chinese novel like Love in the Time of Cholera in mind when I started, but this novel turned out quite different. I wanted to write a book about China that did not have a western character/narrator to hold the hand of the Western reader, because I didn’t think the Chinese needed it. And I wanted to show what was happening to towns like the one I was living in as China moved from a communist economy to a capitalist one. It was just after Wild Swans had come out, and there was very little Chinese fiction in translation.

This novel made a big stir, going to auction when half-written, and selling for a record breaking amount of money, and then going on to win prestigious literary prizes that I had never heard of, like the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and Betty Trask Award (alongside Zadie Smith and Maggie O’Farrel), was picked as a Washington Post Book of the Year, and landed me tea with TS Elliot’s widow, in the Granta offices, in Bloomsbury, London. Sometimes I think I’ve never written better. It was the most fully formed novel I ever wrote, coming out in six months of intense writing. I dream of a novel that comes out like this again. It would be wonderful!

Ciao Asmara

In the summer of 1998 I had moved on from China to Eritrea, and I was cooking tuna pasta in the town of Keren, Eritrea’s second city, when an SUV turned up and a man from the British embassy got out and said ‘We’re evacuating you to the capital. You have an hour to leave.’ I had kept working with volunteer aid organisation, VSO, and in Eritrea, we were trying to help the vast number of young Eritreans who had grown up in refugee camps in Sudan, get an education. Eritrea had just gone back to war with their former colonisers, Ethiopia, after a brief seven year peace and they tipped into a decade long war. Three days later the Ethiopian jets started bombing the capital, and I was air-lifted out of the country as Ethiopian jets waited to begin their bombing runs at the country’s only airport. I remember that each time I’m writing a similar scene in a BL novel. The surreal nature of moments of crisis….

This was the second book I wrote, though the third to be published. (No one was interested in a book on Eritrea, but on the back of The Drink and Dream Teahouse, I insisted it was published – and it went on to be shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Awards) But this book taught me how to write. It tells the story of Eritrea, and Eritreans, and the longest war of the twentieth century – which was their fight for independence. The Ethiopian famine of the 1980s largely happened because of this war, and yet barely got mentioned at the time. It also helps explain why Eritrea is now one of the leading sources of refugees seeking homes outside their native country. It’s an incredibly important story and one I’m very proud to have written, even though the whole experience was tough.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny

Michelle Yeoh is in the news at the moment with her Best Actress Oscar, and this is the closest I’ve come to her. What can I say? I was asked to write the novelisation of the sequel to the Oscar winning film. It was a good book for me to write, because it forced me to break all the rules of writing I thought I knew. Not only was the time-scale tight, but I had always thought that I couldn’t write a novel if I knew the ending… that finding the ending was part of the fun of telling the story, and here I was given the script and six months to write it in. I think writing this novel gave me the confidence to say to Black Library that I thought I was ready to write books for them.

Passing Under Heaven

This was my difficult second novel when I found that everything I had learnt from the first novel was irrelevant here. It’s the story of China’s first feminist poet, who lived at the end of the Tang Dynasty – roughly around the year one thousand. The capital of China then was the New York or London of its time – open, multicultural and diverse with Nestorian Christians, Jews, and Buddhists all combining in a heady mix of ideas and cultures. Foot binding would not come in for another hundred years or so, and women had a surprising amount of independence as courtesans, priestesses or concubines – and this poet, Yu Xuanji, was unique in that her short career included all three. I had translated her poems, and then thought, I should write a novel that explains her life, and times and the poems themselves. It won the Somerset Maugham Award, which people in the industry have heard of, and was picked by the Telegraph and Independent on Sunday as a Book of the Year.

A Bend in the Yellow River

I don’t really admit to this book. But it was my first, I started writing it when I was 22, and it was published when I was 25, and so in a way it opened the door for everything else. I wrote it when books on China were hopelessly scant and out of date, and China was changing at a rapid pace. I wanted to write about my town, and to show the Chinese as I experienced them, which was not inscrutable, or any of the other stereotypes of the time. It was a pretty good book. My editor kept telling me to write more about myself, and I thought the Chinese I was meeting were far more interesting than I was. (I was just a sappy 22 year old..!) Essentially this is my problem with this book: it is the thoughts of my 22 year old self, and like school diaries, these things should never see the light of day. 😉

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Thanks so much to Justin for writing this great post, and for giving us the lowdown on these fascinating books (and ok, technically one of them is more IP fiction than original, but it was too cool not to include)! If you’re keen to get hold of any of these books, check out the links along the way to order* them. In the meantime, here are a few useful links if you’d like to read more about Justin’s work:

My review of Viking Fire

All of the interviews I’ve done with Justin on Track of Words

Justin’s website

If you enjoyed this article and would like to support Track of Words, you can leave me a tip on my Ko-Fi page.

*If you buy anything using one of these links, I will receive a small affiliate commission – see here for more details.