In part two of our interview, best-selling Western Australian author – and this year’s conference keynote speaker – Demelza Carlton reveals more about her series of fairy tale inspired books, her favourite and least favourite tales, and some of her research trips around the world.

You have 27 books (and counting!) in your Romance a Medieval Fairytale series; re-imaginings of some well-known and more obscure stories. What do you love about fairy tales, and will you write more?

I had so much fun writing and researching my medieval fairy tale retellings – and yes, there will be more, although I can’t confirm when as yet.

I love that fairy tales are stories that transcend time and place. We don’t know the original sources, though sometimes we do know when the earliest known written versions came from, and the variations take my breath away in how they encapsulate the history and culture of where they’re set, while at the same time, capturing the heart and soul of a familiar tale.

What do you love about being able to change these traditional tales for a new audience, and to say new things?

Well, writing is always a combination of the familiar and the new – and you need to get the balance right. So, if I’m exploring little-known history, or an island that only a handful of people have ever set foot on, I need a familiar story at the heart of it to entice people to come with to somewhere so new and dangerous.

What did you want to explore about the Hans Christian Andersen story for your Little Mermaid-inspired book Silence?

A lot of Little Mermaid retellings like to twist the tale, to tell it from the sea witch’s perspective. My heroines in that series are mostly witches with various magical power, so it made sense to make the mermaid and the sea witch one and the same – but there remained the problem of her voicelessness. Why would the sea witch take away her own voice, when one word to the prince could mean her happily ever after?

I thought: ‘What if there was something more powerful at play than her crush on a man she barely knew? Love of family, and her wish to save people…’ And I always loved the original tragic ending to Andersen’s tale, so I strove to make my story bittersweet as well.

Do you have a favourite fairy tale?

The Little Mermaid, obviously, but I’ve always been partial to The Brave Little Tailor, because it was about cunning more than strength.

Do you have a least favourite?

The Ballad of Tam Lin and possibly Sleeping Beauty. The first, because he’s a selfish, cheating bastard who doesn’t really deserve to be saved, and Sleeping Beauty because it’s a poor justification for rape and adultery.

You do a lot of research for each of your fairy tales, as you’ve set them in the medieval period. Can you describe one of your research trips?

I spent four months travelling through Europe for my medieval series, from Polish hunting lodges where you weren’t allowed to go outside at night because of wild boars, to Scotland where we stumbled on a castle that inspired both Outlander and Game of Thrones. Actually, there’s a funny story about Finlaggan Castle…

Our trip to Scotland was meant to be a treat for my husband, who is a huge fan of single malt whisky, and I volunteered to be his designated driver on Islay while he visited the distilleries and tasted their wares.

There are NINE distilleries on Islay, and we visited ALL of them. While my husband and his friend were singing loudly in the back seat, with the windows rolled down so the whisky fumes wouldn’t reach me in the driver’s seat, I was thinking about which fairy tales I hadn’t considered yet, and how Three Little Pigs could possibly be turned into a medieval romance for my series. I mean, pigs? Wolves? It was damn near impossible, I decided.

The singing had turned to excited shouts – the boys had spotted a castle, and they wanted to visit. I didn’t believe them, because I’d researched this island, and I knew there weren’t any castles that were relevant to my series, but they were adamant they’d seen a sign pointing to a castle. As there’s no arguing with drunk physicists, I had to turn around and follow that sign, just to show them it didn’t exist.

As we drove down the single-lane, winding road, I caught a glimpse of what had gotten the boys so excited: Finlaggan Castle, or what’s left of it.

A castle on an island that had been used as the seat for Hebridean leaders since the Iron Age (which is before the rise of Rome, so more than 2,000 years). Some of the structures dated back to the Viking occupation of the Hebrides – they didn’t belong in Scotland in the 12th century, when my Romance a Medieval Fairytale series is set. Instead, this castle belonged to a Viking prince, who married the daughter of one of the local islander girls, a lord’s daughter.

And Blow: Three Little Pigs Retold – yes, the book otherwise known as Three Little Pigs, the Romance – was born.

You appear at many author events, such as Supanova and Comic-Con. How does it feel to be able to chat to the readers who love your books?

I swear, when I go to those events, I’m absolutely in awe of the cosplayers, and how much effort goes into the costumes. Sometimes, even more time than it takes me to write a book – yes, really!

It always surprises me the number of people who recognise me at events. I mean, I write in my home office and keep to myself much of the time, so when I do go to those huge events like Comic-Con and Supanova, it’s quite surreal being recognised as me, writer of books, instead of as my kid’s mother.

Actually, those events are the place where I tend to get the strangest inspirations for my next books, usually from readers. Sometimes they offer up character names – their own, or someone they’d love to be a red shirt in one of my books – but also some of the amazing, original artwork, because a picture can inspire 50,000 words.

See Demelza in her only Sydney appearance as the keynote speaker at the 2025 conference Under Water, Over Water, Magical Waters of Fairy Tales, as detailed here, and visit her online at www.demelzacarlton.com