Best-selling Liz Kessler on her new Emily Windsnap novel

It’s your first swimming lesson at secondary school and you can’t wait to dive in. But what’s happening to your legs? They’re fusing together. You’ve got – a tail? You’ve become a mermaid! This is how, 20 years ago, the fictional Emily Windsnap discovered she was a semi-mer. Child of a human mother and merman father, she becomes a mermaid in water. So began a series of middle-grade books by Liz Kessler.

Now, Valley of the Vikings, returning to the world of Windsnap, has just been published. 

“I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to have a tenth Emily book around the 20th anniversary,” says Kessler, who has written shelves full of award-winning middle-grade and YA fiction and whose Emily Windsnap series has since sold more than five million copies worldwide. Her 2021 YA novel, When the World Was Ours, about three Viennese friends in the shadow of the Holocaust, was shortlisted for 25 awards and won 15, including the German Youth Literature Award. Code Name Kingfisher, her most recent YA novel, has already won the Young Quills historical novel award and been shortlisted for ten more prizes.

Emily Windsnap, meanwhile, is still making waves. “There’s a real feeling of nostalgia,” says Kessler. “I’m now getting letters from young women in their 20s saying ‘I want to tell you that the Emily Windsnap books had this role in my life when I was growing up’. These books… have had such an important place in their lives and they’re looking forward to passing them on, or they’re telling me what they were inspired to do by Emily’s bravery. It’s one of the most thrilling and humbling things.”

In Valley of the Vikings, Emily and her friends Shona and Aaron venture to the depths of the ocean and discover lost Viking treasure – and some still-living Vikings, trapped on a time-locked island, following a dispute between Thor and Neptune over the mining of precious crystals. Soon Emily is on a mission to save not only the Vikings, but the world, as the greedy miners have destabilised the seabed and set in motion a potential environmental catastrophe.

Emily has travelled far and wide in the previous nine books – from the Arctic Circle to the Bermuda Triangle – but never before to the furthest depths of the sea. Inspirations for the book included the Damien Hirst exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable – a fictional display of “found” booty, interrogating the concept of truth – as well as reports of underwater life on the Bimini trail (said to be part of the lost city of Atlantis). At the same time, Kessler and her wife, Laura, were watching the TV series The Last Kingdom based on Bernard Cornwell’s novels about the Vikings; Laura also happened to mention the Mariana Trench and came up with the Valley of the Vikings title.

I think of Emily as the secret fantasy me. She and her friends are basically saying down with the patriarchy

The theme of greed and environmental disaster is, thinks Kessler, more overt in Valley of the Vikings than in her previous books, but the Emily Windsnap books are primarily a joyful, inventive, exciting world of rainbow rocks and mystical castles, where characters travel in a dolphin-drawn golden pod with two compartments: an airy one for humans and one filled with water for the merfolk, and where playing outside with friends takes the form of exploring underwater caves and mingling with manta rays. Fun always comes first.

“To me a really important part of being a writer for young people is you have to write books that engage and entertain, and that I’m writing books that come from my heart,” stresses Kessler. But “there’s always been an element of social justice stuff. Even when I’m just writing a story, I can’t help but find (usually when someone tells me) that the values I have show up in the book. They’re fantasy books about a girl who becomes a mermaid but hopefully reflect the truth about life today. Especially when Emily tells Thor and Neptune that it’s time for them to lay down their weapons and hand over their power to the younger generation.”

She regards this scene, where Emily lectures the two old, self-obsessed male world leaders, as “one of the best things that I’ve ever been able to do in my books”.

“I think of Emily as almost the better part of me, the braver part of me, the secret fantasy me. Emily and her friends are basically saying down with the patriarchy and down with war but they’re also kids having a rip-roaring adventure. I love that I’ve been privileged to write about them – that they chose me.” That’s the way Kessler sees the writing process. “The characters choose you and you have the opportunity [to write about them].”

While her protagonists were tangling with tempestuous gods and resisting Nazis, Kessler was facing a challenge of her own – long Covid – which hit during the writing of Code Name Kingfisher.

“Long Covid has been something that’s changed my life completely for the last four years,” she says. “It’s been a really tough time. My main thing has been chronic fatigue. At the beginning there were six months when I didn’t leave the house, when I barely left my bed. It’s not like that now… There’ve been times when I’ve cried a lot and thought I’ve had my life whipped out from underneath me, and times when I’ve been a bit more zen and believed that it’s made me a stronger person. I’ve come to accept a slower quieter way of living – the ups are small but the downs aren’t so bad… I’ve an enormous amount of stuff to be grateful for – a supportive partner, cute dog [a cocker spaniel, Lowen], a loving family.

“The world’s been in such a state. I’ve had to shut off from a lot of it and part of me has always been that I stand up for stuff, but I’ve had to protect myself. It’s been a challenging time but when I do come out of the end of it, I honestly believe that I’m going to be a stronger person in so many ways.”

Reflecting on all her books so far, Kessler sees a thread running through them, from that first Emily Windsnap, and her YA novels such as Read Me Like a Book in which the protagonist comes out as lesbian, to Code Name Kingfisher, which interweaves a story of present-day friendship struggles with the wartime story of Jewish sisters Mila and Hannie, working undercover to save Jewish children in occupied Holland, and back to Emily Windsnap, defying world leaders.

“I have these things that mean a lot to me and one of them is becoming your authentic self and being proud of it and letting yourself shine,” says Kessler. “Hannie’s probably the bravest character I’ve written. She’s basically Emily Windsnap but as a resistance fighter.”

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Valley of the Vikings, published by Zephyr, is out now