GREETINGS, BOOKWORMS! I’m Aisha Kandisha, Head Librarian at Kandisha Press. Join me in the dusty stacks of the library I will never leave again as I chat with some of my favorite Women in Horror. Today we feature author Anna Taborska!
Anna Taborska writes horror stories and screenplays. Her body of work includes three short story collections: Bloody Britain (Shadow Publishing, 2020), Shadowcats (Black Shuck Books, 2019), and For Those Who Dream Monsters (Mortbury Press, 2013, 2020), recipient of the Dracula Society’s Children of the Night Award.
Anna’s stories have appeared in over forty anthologies, including The Best Horror of the Year Volume Four, Best New Writing 2011, Best British Horror 2014, Year’s Best Weird Fiction Volume One, Best New Werewolf Tales (Vol. 1), and Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror.
She has been nominated for a British Fantasy Award thrice, and for a Bram Stoker Award® five times, including for her illustrated storybook A Song for Barnaby Jones (Zagava, 2021). An Italian translation of Anna’s collection Bloody Britain is scheduled for release by Independent Legions Publishing in 2024.
Anna has also directed five films, including award-winning drama The Rain Has Stopped, and worked on twenty other film and television productions, such as the BBC / PBS series “Auschwitz: The Nazis and ‘The Final Solution’”.
You can visit Anna at the following sites: https://annataborska.wixsite.com/horror and http://www.imdb.me/anna.taborska
What made you want to become an author? Did you have an “Aha!” moment when you knew you were born to write? Or perhaps a beloved book inspired you?
No “Aha!” moment for me, I’m afraid. My writing beginnings were much less exciting.
I’ve always written in one form or another. Most of my ‘day jobs’ have involved a fair degree of writing. My first job was at the cultural branch of the Polish Embassy in London, where I wrote press releases about art exhibitions and film screenings. Later I worked at the London Evening Standard newspaper, where I wrote a weekly page called “The Man on the Clapham Omnibus” – in the first person and in the prescribed “camp and pompous” style. I also worked at the in-house advertising agency for the Samsung Group, where I was responsible for the company’s pan-European newsletter.
When I ditched lucrative employment and ran away to join the circus, or, to be more precise, the film industry, I eventually ended up writing screenplays, and from there it was a relatively small jump to writing prose. And that’s when my love of reading horror stories turned into a love of writing them.
What do you believe are your strengths in writing? And when you feel you need to improve on a particular writing skill, how do you go about it?Over the years, I’ve had the very good fortune to meet many wonderful people working in the horror genre – both on the literary and the filmmaking side of things. One such person was the late great film director Norman J. Warren – creator of such cult gems as “Prey”, “Terror”, “Satan’s Slave”, and “Inseminoid”. Norman was often described as “the gentleman of horror” or “the gentleman of British exploitation” and was, unlike his films, one of the nicest people you could hope to meet. He once read a story of mine (it was “Cut!” from my first collection, For Those Who Dream Monsters) and made my day by telling me that I write excellent dialogue. I wouldn’t go as far as Norman did! But I do think that I write decent dialogue because I always try to picture my characters talking and try to make their speech as realistic as possible, while injecting a healthy dose of dark humour into it whenever I can.When I feel that I need to improve on a particular writing skill, I try to learn as much as I can about it. In the past, this involved attending courses (for example, on screenwriting) or buying books (such as Stephen King’s On Writing), but now (and I hate to admit it) I mostly do a lot of Googling, watch YouTube videos, and attend webinars.
What are your thoughts on the book industry today, or more importantly, about the book community? Do you feel it is getting harder or easier to make it as an independent author these days?
With regard to whether it’s getting harder or easier to make it as an independent author, I suppose that depends on one’s definition of “make it”.
With the huge advances in technology in recent years, pretty much anyone can become an independent author (the same is true when it comes to becoming an independent filmmaker). Actually “making it” as an independent author is more complex. In theory, because of the vast number of people able to self-publish their work, it should be harder to break through the competition, to get noticed and be successful. But this doesn’t really seem to be the case, as a fair number of people claim to make a reasonable living through self-publishing.
There is, however, a big downside to this. And I don’t just mean the demise of many excellent small presses that have suddenly found themselves redundant as a result of the overwhelming increase in authors choosing to self-publish. What is also happening (quietly, without many people noticing or caring) is that, while those authors who are good at marketing, at self-promotion, at funnelling traffic to their websites and books, are rising to the surface (whether they are good, bad, or mediocre), many very talented writers who lack the skills, time or energy to drive readers to their websites (or to create websites in the first place) are falling by the wayside.
On the bright side, there is a fabulous book community out there. There are readers who support writers by posting about the books they are reading and leaving reviews (for example, on Goodreads). There are writers who support other writers in similar ways and also by hosting fellow authors on their websites. There are specialized review sites (such as The Ginger Nuts of Horror) where reviewers write about and recommend books and authors. There are podcasters and magazine editors (such as Trevor Kennedy of Phantasmagoria) who interview authors and discuss books. There are Facebook groups and blogs such as yours, which support authors. And, of course, small presses that take a risk on less established authors and publish their work with little hope of financial gain or even of making back the money they invest. There is a lot of support to be found, but authors need to look for it.
Tell us about your work. What story are you most proud of?
I think the story I’m most proud of is “The Girl in the Blue Coat” (from my collection For Those Who Dream Monsters).
It is (tragically) based on a true story told to me by an elderly Polish lady whose best friend and her family were murdered by occupying Nazi German forces during World War Two, as part of the unfolding Holocaust. The history of the murdered Jewish family, and of the thriving Polish village decimated by the genocide of its wider Jewish population, haunted me for many years, until eventually I was able to exorcise it by writing a ghost story. Everything in the core story is true, apart from the ghost.
I was playing with narrative form at the time, so the story of the girl in the blue coat is told as a story within a story, within a story, within another story, and luckily it seems to work, despite sounding a bit complicated, as Laird Barron later selected it when he was editing the anthology Year’s Best Weird Fiction: Volume One for ChiZine Publications.
I’m happy to say that the anthology was subsequently translated into Italian, and so “The Girl in the Blue Coat” became my first story to be translated into a foreign language.
What are your upcoming works and plans for the future?
My most notable work due out this year is an anthology I co-edited with Carol Gyzander called Discontinue if Death Ensues: Tales from the Tipping Point. It consists of stories and poems written by the five finalists of the Horror Writers Association’s 2021 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction. That was the first year that all five finalists were women, and we decided to collaborate on a book centring around characters who are also women. The main idea behind the stories is that millennia of male violence against the female body, and uncontrolled climate change, have reached a tipping point, precipitating mutations in women that bode ill for abusive men and for the world at large. The stories range from reimagined myths and folk horror to body horror and science fiction. The anthology is scheduled for release in September as part of Flame Tree Publishing’s new Beyond and Within series of stunning hardcover anthologies. Apart from my stories and Carol’s, the book also features work by Lee Murray (winner of the 2021 Stoker Award), and multiple-award nominees Cindy O’Quinn and Kyla Lee Ward.
I also have several short stories coming out later this year. The editors of The Weird Cat, Katherine Kerestman and S. T. Joshi, have accepted my story “Endless” for their forthcoming anthology Shunned Houses. My story “Third Time Lucy” is coming out in Long Division: Stories of Social Decay, Societal Collapse, and Bad Manners, edited by Michael Bailey and Doug Murano, and I have a story called “Dreams in the Winter House” in Alessandro Manzetti’s upcoming anthology Enter Boogeyman.
Finally, I am very happy to say that my latest collection Bloody Britain is being published in Italian translation by Independent Legions – hopefully in April.
With regard to future plans, I’ve returned to writing screenplays and this looks set to continue in 2024. But I also dearly wish to resume writing a portmanteau novel I started a couple of years ago and had to put on pause. It is essentially a collection of short stories set in a fictional creepy pub in West London called The Organ Grinder, which has, over the years, hosted an array of strange characters, including some powerful and extraordinary women. There is of course a mysterious pub cat that would have been better suited to the pyramids of Ancient Egypt, and a sinister mist that rises from the cellar on certain nights. I very much hope to get back to working on Tales from the Organ Grinder later this year – it’s about time!
Many thanks for including my interview on the Kandisha Press blog – it’s an honour! And thank you for all the support you give to women authors. I wish you all the very best!
KANDISHA PRESS 