Kerstin Hall

Kerstin Hall is a South African science fiction and fantasy writer. Her works include Star Eater and Asunder. Quotes Asunder emerged from a short story I wrote around 2018, which covered some of the same events that eventually appeared in the novel — specifically the part where Karys returns to the village where she grew up. It’s a relatively chaotic, feverish sequence, but none of the detail is incidental—and what was especially fun for me is that the overwhelming density of the action enabled a lot of authorial sleight of hand. I don’t know, there’s just a real creative kick in being sneaky. It always makes me feel weirdly gleeful. I drafted this sequence about…three and a half years ago now? Probably in the first half of 2022. My memory is a bit fuzzy. I know it was a really fun chapter to write, and a section I had been building towards. Sort of the mini-climax of an act. So I knew upfront that I needed to drop a lot of detail about Toraigus and amity beads in order to set up a later twist. Ideally, I wanted to accomplish this without the reader noticing they were being clued in. I also wanted the reader to learn more about Ferain, and to infer his feelings for Karys…and I trusted that the character stuff would do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of distracting everyone from the giant neon Big-Twist-Being-Set-Up-Here signs. External links Category:Living people Category:Science fiction authors Category:Women authors from South Africa Category:Short story writers from South Africa Category:Novelists from South Africa