Most recently he’s been trusted with reinventing and expanding the world of Doctor Who and, owing to a trilogy of award-winning fantasy novels for young adults he authored over the past few years, he’s been celebrated as ‘the next JK Rowling’.
If it weren’t yet very clear, Dave Rudden is really serious about the art of storytelling. He also teaches writing and devotes a lot of his time (well over 400 events so far) engaging with kids, demystifying the process of becoming a writer, and answering their questions. He professes to prefer kids’ events to the more adult discussions since children have a habit of cutting to the chase in ways that lofty conversations about creativity and inspiration don’t usually do.
The 2019 Malta Book Festival organisers have however made sure that this November audiences of all ages will get a chance of getting to know the prolific Irish writer and his works better.
Rudden’s literary debut with the first book of the Knights of the Borrowed Dark (Puffin, 2016) trilogy came at the age of 25. He received the call announcing the publisher’s interest in a Dublin shop while together with his girlfriend they contemplated the unenviable choice between a €2 fancy soup or a €1 ‘dust-flavoured soup + baguette’. The comparisons to JK Rowling don’t stop there, but they’re not without some significant qualifiers.
The protagonist in the supernatural world of Knights of the Borrowed Dark is 13-year-old orphan Denizen Hardwick, bookish, a bit awkward, comes from a very small town in Ireland, and doesn’t shy away from reflecting the anxiety that often accompanies teenage years.
Denizen grows up on fantasy novels, Harry Potter books are on a bookshelf at the orphanage. Under the influence of these books fellow orphans are hopeful to start their new lives as prophesied warriors or wizards, but not Denizen – he doesn’t believe in magic. That’s until a brusque aunt draws him into a magical destiny and recruits him into a secret organisation fighting magical creatures of darkness with incantations made of light.
In shaping Denizen, Rudden drew on a lot of his own experiences, particularly being bookish, a nervous child, a bit odd as a teenager, and therefore prone to being bullied. Storytelling and theatre have also been for Rudden a means to gain confidence once he moved to Dublin to study English and become a schoolteacher. Writing, reading and acting taught him you can be anyone you want as long as you can sell it, and he has made spreading this tale of transformation nothing short than a mission while talking to groups of kids in schools and festivals. Doing the right thing and the human cost of courage are other recurring themes of the novels and talks alike.
The transformation he’s most keen to talk about is his own realisation as a writer. In interviews he often repeats there is no blueprint to becoming a writer. Rudden’s first exercises in writing included online fan fiction inspired by the world of Doctor Who, and the first chapter of Knights of the Borrowed Dark was drafted for an assignment as part of his MA in Creative Writing. Somewhere along the way he managed to bridge the divide between one’s own self-image as someone who likes stories, to someone who also writes them - with his interactions he hopes others take the plunge.
At the invitation of the custodians of the literary franchise, Rudden has just published an anthology of 12 stories of the villains from Doctor Who for kids under the title Doctor Who: Twelve Angels Weeping. It just happens that some very young aspiring writers are just as inspired, a young generation of readers are now writing their own fan-fiction inspired by Rudden’s books.
The Malta Book Festival 2019 will take place at the Mediterranean Conference Centre, Valletta, starting from Wednesday, November 6 until Sunday, November 10. On the evening of Thursday, November 7, Dave Rudden will be joining three other guest authors for the annual conference organised by the National Book Council, which this year will revolve around the theme of science fiction and fantasy writing. He will be interviewed by Robert Pisani about his works on Thursday, November 7 and audiences will have the opportunity to ask questions and have their books signed. As a treat to schoolchildren visiting the Book Festival, Rudden will also have a special performance on Friday morning, November 8.