Annabel Steadman was a 22-year-old trainee solicitor commuting between London and Oxford when she had a vision of a unicorn. “I wasn’t thinking about writing a book at all. It just kind of came into my head as I was walking along,” she says. “I saw this image of a unicorn, with a boy riding it. And I immediately knew that it wasn’t the fluffy kind that were starting to come into the shops at that time.”
Eight years later, she is about to launch a series of novels, the first three of which secured an eye-watering seven-figure advance believed to be the largest ever paid to a debut children’s writer. The first in the series is already being translated into 38 languages, and a film script is in development.
True to that first vision, Steadman’s unicorns are not cute, candy-coated creatures, but ravening beasts who feed on raw meat and have no qualms about killing riders unfortunate enough to fall off in their terrifying airborne races and battles. They also suffer from flatulence, which undercuts the majesty of their soaring and swooping with a more earthbound reality of mounts that trot along, announcing their riders’ arrival by letting off a fart with every step.
It’s a high-low combo that has always been irresistible to the novels’ intended readers – eight- to 12-year-olds – though early reports suggest it also appeals to a generation who grew up with Harry Potter and are now parents themselves. Steadman’s favourite feedback is from a mother in the US lucky enough to have an advance copy. “She said: ‘You’ve ruined our bedtimes. We were up an hour and a half later than we should have been last night. But I didn’t want to stop and he didn’t want to stop. So we just kept on going.’”
The concept is a clever hybrid of fantasy, friendship comedy, boarding-school fiction and the almost physical thrill of old-fashioned pony novels. “He felt the least ordinary he’d ever felt in his life,” thinks Skandar, as he takes his first exhilarating flight, in the face of a deadly unicorn stampede. “He was a superhero. A wizard. No, better than that – a unicorn rider.” It’s a cheeky nod to the novels’ lineage, back through Harry Potter to Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy and the horse-filled fiction of KM Peyton – all the novels that set Steadman’s own pulse racing as a child.
The fantasy is so rich and baroque, with its elemental battles between young riders who channel fire, water, earth, air and spirit as weapons, that I’d half expected its author to look equally exotic. But there’s not even the teeniest little unicorn tattoo in evidence on the 30-year-old woman who turns up to be interviewed at her publishers’ deserted London HQ, where she has requested we meet because her barrister husband is working in their north London flat, and she didn’t want to interrupt him.
Skandar and the Unicorn Thief introduces our hero as an uncool 13-year-old from the seaside town of Margate, whose status changes when he is spirited away to join the elite who have passed the Hatchery exam – the unicorn world’s equivalent of the 11-plus, which entitles them to join an island training camp for everyone’s favourite TV spectacle, the Chaos Cup.
Margate was the Kentish town Steadman and her mum would visit for shopping trips to Primark when she and her two younger brothers were growing up in the nearby village of Chillenden. Like Skandar, she was also spirited away to an elite private school – King’s, Canterbury, thanks to a music bursary. She had her first go at writing a children’s book when she was 13, and wrote another when she was 15. “I was quite a confident child,” she says, “but there was always a part of me that was sensible and reserved.”
At nine, she had kidney surgery after developing type 1 diabetes at the age of four. “I was on the operating table for nine hours or something, and I remember thinking, when they put me under the anaesthetic, that I might not wake up.” The experience gave her a useful sense of mortality. “I think it made me someone who knows life is short, so you have to get on with it,” she says.
When she was rising 13, her parents divorced and her father left. “We lost our house and didn’t have any money at all. My mum had me and my two brothers. And I think I had to grow up a lot then. We were kind of making everything OK together, though my mum was a superhero. She never really let us know that things were not OK.”
Skandar is also the child of a single parent, although in his case, his mum has died, leaving his dad to raise him and his older sister. There is sibling guilt, as Skandar comes to terms with getting into the Hatchery when his sister failed, and a sense of premature responsibility for a father who is sometimes too depressed to get out of bed, and whose hopes are pinned on at least one of his children becoming a unicorn rider.
After King’s, Steadman went to Cambridge University on a choral scholarship. She first studied languages, then law, and met her future husband, Joe, when they were first-year students singing in the same choir. But a couple of years into her training she knew that law was never going to be the calling that made her heart sing. “I thought, now’s the time. I don’t want to spend my whole life regretting not writing, or going into a bookshop and thinking, ‘If only my name was on one of these books.’” So she enrolled on a creative writing course, where she wrote a short story collection and an adult novel about lawyers, which won her an agent but was rejected by 20 publishers.
In despondency, she changed agents and returned to the boy on the unicorn. By the time the first book was ready to send out to publishers, she had conjured up a five-volume arc that will take Skandar and his friends from 13 to 18 without losing faith with their middle-grade fans. “I didn’t want to bring sex in to it, or for the novels to get very long,” says Steadman.
Within two days of sending it out to publishers, she received her first offer. “I just completely broke down crying,” she says. “It’s funny, because of all the moments, that is the one where I’ve been completely overwhelmed by emotion. And it was nowhere near the level of offer that we eventually got to in the auction. But it was just that feeling of: ‘Someone wants this, it will be a book.’” Over the weekend the film rights were snapped up, and by the end of the following week, in September 2020, she had secured her record-breaking three-book deal, using AF Steadman as a pen-name because her initials were shorter, and it struck her that it might be handy to keep business and personal mail separate.
Lockdown enabled her to immerse herself in the mythology of the novels. “It’s so strange thinking that almost the entire first book was written when we couldn’t go outside, but it was lovely to live in a fantasy world. I think that was one of the things that captured the publishers’ imagination. Everyone wanted to escape.”
When we meet, she’s just back from the prestigious Bologna children’s book fair, which brought her full circle, back to her love of languages and also to her early days of doodling the names of unicorns in a notebook that, to her immense regret, she has now lost. Names like Scoundrel’s Luck or Equator’s Conundrum don’t have literal translations, she explains, so translators have had fun finding the equivalents in their own languages.
I tell her that Mark Haddon, an earlier writer who lucked out with a debut children’s novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, bought a house with the proceeds and named it Dog Towers. Is there anything she has splashed out on? “It’s been amazing for me, as someone who has always worried about money, to be able to not worry about it any more. I never really thought I would get to that place,” she says. “To be honest, a lot of it’s in savings, because that’s the kind of person I am. But it’s meant I can give some money to my mum, which is the first thing I thought of. It just means that none of us have to worry any more.”
Skandar and the Unicorn Thief is published by Simon & Schuster Children’s Books on 28 April
