He admits this has put him under added pressure. Now that fantasy is in the mainstream, however, his work reaches a wider audience than ever before. ‘I write what I like to read.’ Photograph: HarperCollins I get to play ‘let’s pretend’ and they pay me money for it. “My dad was a producer, director and writer in Hollywood so I grew up around a lot of people who thought being famous was important. “I have no vanity about my … celebrity,” he says, hesitating before the final word as though trying to find a less grandiose synonym. Public interest doesn’t determine what he writes – it just changes how many people are reading it. But since releasing his first novel, Magician, in 1982, Feist has remained steadfast in his motivations. After all, he has 20m books in print and is in the middle of a gruelling world tour for King of Ashes – the first in his new Firemane series. “You can’t chase a trend,” Feist says – and he laughs, acknowledging it would be easy to call him a liar. “The stuff that your mom and pop said, ‘Why are you reading that?’ That’s the stuff that you can go out and produce now you own a studio.”īut tastes are unpredictable the rise of fantasy could have been the rise of anything else. When the children raised reading JRR Tolkien (and the wave of fantasy authors that followed) came of age, Feist says, they had a desire to see these stories on the big and small screen, and set about putting that desire into action. “When Lord of the Rings came out in paperback in America it was our generation’s Harry Potter.” “When I was a kid, fantasy didn’t exist in anything except literature,” says Feist. But it’s harder to discern why audiences were ready to hear these kinds of stories. It’s easy to point to causes after the fact – say the success of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, or the popularity of Harry Potter. Some time during his 36-year career, the public’s attitude towards the fantasy genre underwent a colossal shift. When he started writing, his books were niche, embraced by a small but enthusiastic community.
“And unless you’re blindly lucky, you can’t anticipate one.”Īs one of the world’s most successful fantasy fiction authors, Feist finds himself in a strange position. “You can’t chase a trend,” says Raymond E Feist.
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