Melvin Burgess: ‘The Norse myths are full of sex and violence’
Melvin Burgess, 68, was born in Twickenham and lives in Todmorden, west Yorkshire. The author of more than 20 novels for teenagers and children, he won the Carnegie medal in 1996 for , in which two 14-year-old runaways fall into heroin addiction; , introducing the book’s 20th anniversary edition, said it “opened my eyes to the possibilities when writing for young adults”. When Anne Fine reviewed Burgess’s 2003 novel for the – it’s about the sex lives of three secondary school boys – she said the publishers should be “deeply ashamed”, advising them to “leave this age group… to find that sort of filth for themselves”. Burgess’s new novel, , a retelling of Norse myth, is hisA friend in Leeds, Martin Riley, has a theatre company, Alive and Kicking, which does events for kids. They’ll go into a primary school that’s doing the Vikings, say, and he’ll be the protector god Heimdall, who’s lost his courage. The kids have to give it back to him; if they fail, the frost giants take over Asgard [the gods’ home]. Martin said: “Why don’t you come along and play Loki and try to beat me by getting the kids to give me back my courage?” We did it for a few years and it was a lot of fun. He kept saying I should do a book. I was planning to write it with a poet friend who was going to do Loki’s voice but I thought, actually, that’s the best bit, why give it away?There was no horse-fucking, I can promise you! It was all very decent but the Norse myths full of violence and there’s quite a lot of sex too, so I ran with that in the book because it was true, mythologically speaking. Any collection of Norse myths will tell you the gods did a deal to build a wall to keep the giants out of Asgard. They were going to lose the sun and the moon and the beautiful goddess Freyja [to pay the builder for getting it done in a year]. So Loki turns himself into a mare and leads the [builder’s] stallion away [to slow things down to avoid paying]. He fucks a horse and produces a foal; even though I’m known in the YA area for transgressive things, I don’t think I’d have bothered putting that in a YA novel.
