1.- Could you introduce yourself to Jamreads’ readers?
I’m Laura Elliott, a disabled author, journalist, and disability campaigner based in Sheffield, where I live with my partner James and our two feline overseers, Catticus Finch and Hercule Purrot.

2.- When did you start writing for publishing?
I decided I was going to be an author when I was six-years-old and suddenly realised that people wrote the books that I’d been reading, and so “author” was an actual job that someone could do. I think I always planned from then on that one day I’d be published, but the route to getting here was slow! I wrote my first (terrible) full-length novel when I was sixteen, then I had a couple of (okay-ish) short stories published in my university’s creative writing magazine when I was 19 – 21.
For most of my twenties I wrote a few short stories and creative pieces of non-fic that found homes in various anthologies by publishers and indie magazines like Boudicca Press, Cloister Fox, and Hachette Kids. I was also qualified as a journalist by then, so I’ve had various freelance articles on disability and politics published in The Guardian, the Metro, ByLine Times and elsewhere.
I wrote a second (also terrible!) novel around the age of twenty-four, but then the idea for Awakened came to me in 2016 and I thought that this one was probably going to be It. I am very happy to have been proven right, for once!

3.- You have previous experience as a journalist. How has it influenced your fiction writing style?
I think my instinct to situate fiction within a real-world context probably comes from my training as a journalist. When I was writing Awakened it seemed very natural to include little snippets of real-world history in the world-building for the dystopia, and I probably have my training as a journalist to thank (or to blame!) for that.

4.- How did the first idea for Awakened appear for you?
Awakened actually had a rather bleak beginning for me. In 2015/16 I became mostly-housebound after a series of viruses left me with a number of disabilities, and eventually I had to leave full-time work because my body couldn’t keep pace anymore. The thought came to me that: “no matter how sick I am, society is going to make me work until I die. If they could, they’d steal sleep from me entirely as long as it made them money”. And — voila! The idea of an Anonymous Billionaire and a team of scientists who invented a neuralchip to take sleep away and make humanity more ‘productive’ was born.
It may have been a rather bleak start, but actually writing Awakened has been a great kind of personal therapy, and it kept me going when I was very sick and struggling to rebuild my life after becoming disabled so suddenly.

5.- Would you say Awakened changed much from the first draft to the published book?
I am my own worst nightmare, in that I don’t plot ahead of time. I have to write my way into a story/character rather than simply thinking about it beforehand, so yes in some ways it changed a lot. I always knew they were going to be in the Tower of London, and that the driving force of the novel was going to be the arrival of the two survivors — I also knew that I was going to riff a little on Hannibal vs Clarice in the Silence of the Lambs in terms of Thea’s interviews with the male survivor.
Beyond that, most of it was up in the air, and because I write my first drafts on a typewriter so I can’t edit as I go, a lot of things changed as I went. As an example, until about 80% of the way through the first draft I’d only written Thea’s mother as existing in flashback, but it suddenly occurred to me that the book was much more impactful if Thea was still caring for her, so around the 80% mark I suddenly started writing as though her mother had always been in the Tower with them. Then in the second draft I had to include her from the start! That was... somewhat fraught.

6.- Could you tell us a bit of how it was the behind-the-scenes process of getting agented and selling Awakened to Angry Robot?
I actually did everything a bit chaotically at this part of the process! I owe my editor, Simon Spanton at Angry Robot, a great deal of credit for snapping Awakened up in the first place. Simon and I had been mutuals on Twitter for a while, and since I’d been writing the book for years (very slowly) he’d seen me tweet about the concept of sleepless monsters and had mentioned in a DM that he was interested in seeing what I came up with.
When I finally came to the stage of being ready for submission, I submitted to one agent and received a (very complimentary) rejection. Then I sent out a batch of six queries and decided at the same time to send Simon an email. I’d only had one other person read the book at this point and I wanted Simon to tell me if what I’d written was at all publishable, or if I was barking up completely the wrong tree. He asked me: “Do you want me to read this with my editor hat on, or just as a friend?” and I chose “friend”.
A couple of weeks later he came back to me after reading the manuscript, and told me that he was putting his editor hat back on because he wanted it, and asked if he had my permission to take Awakened to an acquisitions meeting with Angry Robot. At which point I shrieked to my partner, said yes, and then sent emails out to the agents I’d already queried telling them that I now had publisher interest.
Amazingly, the acquisitions meeting went well, and Angry Robot decided they wanted my (at the time) un-agented book! I then sent another batch of emails out to the agents I was on sub with, and my fabulous agent Caro at Portobello Literary replied immediately saying that they’d nearly finished reading the full manuscript and would like a video call to see if we’d be a good fit together. The video call happened I think about a week later, I signed on the dotted line, and then thankfully Caro jumped into the process to negotiate the finer points of my contract with Angry Robot, since by that point of things I was feeling very out of my depth.
Basically, I did everything back-to-front, but within the space of about two months at the start of 2024 I went from having no agent or publisher, to having both signed within the same couple of weeks. It was very strange and very serendipitous — but it did feel like the stars had decided to align.

7.- What other pieces of media would you recommend to people that enjoyed Awakened?
I have three I would recommend! Carrion Crow by Heather Parry for some isolated gothic body horror; Leech by Hiron Ennes for some gothic dystopian medical parasite horror; and HellSans by fellow Angry Robot author Ever Dundas, for a disability-driven sci-fi dystopia in which a ubiquitous advertising font makes people sick.

8.- It has passed a week since Awakened was released to the world. How do you feel about it?
It’s all seemed very surreal, to be honest! I’ve really enjoyed being tagged in posts online by readers, and I feel very grateful for all of the authors who’ve lent their quotes to the book. I was surprised to realise how much I’ve enjoyed recording podcasts and getting to talk to people about Awakened, because I’ve never really done that before.
The book didn’t really involve anyone else apart from me until Simon whisked it off to Angry Robot, and I’m a very solitary writer by nature in that I don’t like to share unfinished drafts with anyone, so being able to speak to people and chat about books has been genuinely lovely. There have also been some highlights, like being included in The Guardian’s “best of horror, sci-fi, and fantasy” review round-up, which I absolutely didn’t expect!  

10.- What can we expect from Laura Elliott in the future?
I’m working on a second standalone novel right now, which is a bit closer to folk horror than the gothic/sci-fi of Awakened. The task I’ve set myself in my head for the next one is: “If Shirley Jackson wrote Lord of the Flies set in an isolated English country house in the year 2007, with teenage girls.” So we’ll see how well I manage to pull that off!