The Whites clearly think of themselves as the good guys, and to the impartial observer clearly this is questionable, but it doesn’t mean they’re all bad.

My overriding intention was to play around with the assumption that ‘we are the good guys, and they are the bad guys’, whoever we and they are. And I also adore Luna Lovegood from Harry Potter.Ĥ.Ěs a person of dual-heritage I can’t help but wonder whether the struggle Nathan has between his ‘white’ and ‘black’ magical backgrounds may be representative of a struggle with his own ethnicity-was that the intention? I still love the wicked witch in Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (the cartoon from 1959 not the recent film), she’s stunning. I’d written a few short stories from the male point of view and it was a challenge to myself as a writer to see if I could do it.Īs soon as I started writing in Nathan’s voice it felt like it was working and I never had any major doubts about it.ģ.Ěpart from your own characters, who is your favourite fictional witch? Yes, having decided on a female dominated world I still wanted to write about a boy – I had the character in my head and knew he would be fun to write. I love the Hunters (the White Witch police force) who are a sort of Amazonian SAS (with a few token men who have to be extremely good to be allowed to join).Ģ.ğurther to that, when considering witches (sweeping statement alert) we usually think of them as female (Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Mildred Hubble, Hocus Pocus etc.), what made you decide to have a male protagonist? I purposely avoided the word wizard to emphasise the importance of females. The other thing that got me excited was that I thought I could create a witchy world where women had stronger witchy powers and higher social status. I didn’t know (and still don’t) much about witches but did know there were White Witches (who were ‘good’) and Black Witches (‘bad’) and it just seemed a perfect opportunity to play around with expectations – about labels and the assumptions we make about other people. My original idea was the Giving Ceremony and something happening when 3 gifts were given – becoming a witch seemed the obvious choice. What made you decide to write about witches? Caitlin Mehta from Children’s Book Chat asks YA author Sally Green some questions about her YA Book Prize-shortlisted novel, Half Bad:ġ.

Books like half bad