Monday, February 9, 2009

Interview with Charlaine Harris from Arkansas Educational Television Network

Steve Barnes sits down with New York Times bestselling author Charlaine Harris this month and discusses her Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire series.

Born in Tunica, Mississippi and growing up literally in the middle of a cotton field, Charlaine has been writing since she was a teenager. While her early writing consisted mainly of ghost stories, she began writing poetry and focusing on plays as a natural expression of her talent during her young adult years at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.

In her interview with Steve, Charlaine recounts how she was given the opportunity to stay at home and write. She wrote and published a couple of mysteries and after having three children created the two different book series, “Aurora Teagarden” and “Lily Bard”, ultimately winning an Agatha nomination for the Teagarden series, but according to her online bibliography “began to realize that neither of those series was ever going to set the literary world on fire,” that is until she decided to mix-up genres and offer a very unconventional take on the vampire mythos. An interesting twist allowed Charlaine’s vampires in the Sookie Stackhouse series to ingest a blood substitute and integrate into everyday society. As imagined this creates all sorts of problems for vampires and non-vampires alike.

The success of Charlaine’s Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire series captured the attention of HBO who turned it into a made for television series called True Blood. This series earned favor with the Golden Globe voters, garnering a nomination for best dramatic series and a best dramatic actress nod for star Anna Paquin.

Please stay tuned to AETN for this interesting interview and check out Charlaine’s website for the latest news concerning any of her books, her blog or events calendar at www.charlaineharris.com.

http://www.aetn.org/programs/barnesand/archives/posts/barnes_and..._a_conversation_with_charlaine_harris


1 comments:

Louisianagirl29 said...

I love this woman! She got me to read more books. I'm a total movie buff and I spend alot of time in front of the tv. When you have kids you don't get much time to read. When I heard about the books, I just had to get them. My husband got me the first 3 books for my birthday last year and I fell in love with them so much. My husband was so happy that he got my the rest of the books for Christmas. I've read them so many times. I think they are the greatest books I've ever read. Thank you Charlaine!