A Goodreads user asked Anna Smith Spark:

What inspired the world of Empires of Dust?

Anna Smith Spark Hello Giovanna. I'm so sorry it's taken me so long to answer your question. I'd offer lots of excuses, but basically I just didn't notice it on Goodreads and I'm sorry about that. Especially as it's a question I like to answer.

So .... I honestly have no real idea where the Empires of Dust world came from. To sound very pretentious, it sometimes feels like it was there, fully formed, in my mind, before I started to write. Writing The Court of Broken Knives was very much a process of discovery, the world and the characters revealing themselves to me as I wrote. As the action moved across different parts of the world, it did feel as though I was discovering these places, seeing them for the first time.

I studied classics at university, I read a great deal of history and mythology. The Empires of Dust world is heavily influenced by the Homeric Greece of Iliad and of Alexander the Great; the Britain and Ireland of the Tain, the Gododdin, the Mabinogeon, Beowulf. And the great poetry of fantasy cities - Yeats' Byzantium, Coleridge's Khubla Khan, Flecker's Golden Road to Samarkand. I think the world of Empires of Dust is probably the sum and substance of my reading and studies over my entire life, in book form.

flag