Today I am interviewing Francesco Dimitri, author of the new fantasy novel, The Book of Hidden Things.
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DJ: Hi Francesco! Thanks for agreeing to do this interview!
For readers who aren’t familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself?
Francesco Dimitri: I am Italian. I live in London now, and I write in English, but once upon a time I used to live in Rome and publish books in Italian. At some point I decided to start from scratch in another language. The only problem being – I did not speak that language yet.
DJ: What were some of your influences for The Book of Hidden Things?
Francesco: I have very wide tastes. I think you can see traces of Robert Macfarlane, with his perfect sense of the connection between people and place, and Joe Lansdale, with his uncanny capacity to write stories you read in three hours and stay with you forever. Donna Tartt taught me the kind of magic I wanted to write about, and I regularly go back and study Angela Carter to learn new things about sensuousness in prose. That said, I try to keep the real world in mind as my main influence. I do like the real world quite a lot, with all its shortcomings.
DJ: Could you briefly tell us a little about your main characters? Do they have any cool quirks or habits, or any reason why readers with sympathize with them?
Francesco: I wanted them to act, move, and feel, like real people. Not particularly good or bad, just human, with their human foibles, incoherences, and so on. Tony is the one I feel closer to: he believes that friends and family come before everything else, and so do I. Continue reading
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