A Goodreads user asked Zoë Marriott:

I adore your book The Swan Kingdom, Alexandra is an awesome character and I loved the plot twists, the romance and especially your writing! But do you have anymore plans to write books based on hidden and not very popular fairy tales?

Zoë Marriott Thank you so much! It's been over a decade now since I wrote The Swan Kingdom, and to hear that people still read it, and still like it, is humbling and uplifting.

Growing up The Wild Swans was always my favourite fairytale. I had a gorgeously illustrated picture book of the story which was (and is) one of my most treasured possessions, and when I started borrowing books of myths and folklore from the library, variations on the tale (a sister toiling to save brothers from a terrible, beastly or birdly enchantment) would crop up very often. So it never really occurred to me that it was considered a lesser fairytale, or that people wouldn't know it. I always wanted to explore it further and write my own version, and I was grateful that as far as I was aware no one famous had gotten there first, but that was all.

It was only when The Swan Kingdom was published, and I saw some readers praise it for retelling an 'unknown' fairytale, and different readers assume that I had plagiarised the work of another author (whose book was also based on that fairytale) that I realised how few people had grown up with this story as I did.

Since then, I've written two more fairytale retellings - Shadows on the Moon, which is based on Cinderella, and another one (yet to be published) based on Beauty and the Beast. Obviously, both of these stories have been made into Disney movies, which means everyone thinks they know what the 'original' version is, or should be. There's a certain flexibility in retelling a story which is very well known. You can feel free to make all kinds of changes to the plot and subvert the characters or invert certain parts and know that people will understand exactly the way you're bouncing new ideas off the old ones. But at the same time, there will also often be people who think you've ruined the best parts - even if those things were literally only added into the Disney version ten years ago.

The truth is that even extremely well-known fairytales are not nearly as well known as you might think. Most of us imagine, say, Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Beauty and the Beast as a single story, a fixed thing with certain characters and plot points which are inviolable. But these usually bear at most a passing resemblance to the spoken versions of folklore which were originally transcribed by people like Anderson and Grimm. There are a million variations on every story, and the further you go back in time the darker and scarier many tales of this kind are. So when I choose to explore any fairytale, I'm most likely retelling a hidden, not very popular version of it - and I'm also remaking it anew, making it into something that no one else has ever seen before.

Having said all that, I have next to me now a copy of The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales by Franz Xaver Von Schonwerth, which is a treasure trove of tales that were basically lost to time until very recently. And I am still a fan of Celtic and Greek and Japanese mythology. So it's entirely possible that in the future I'll stumble across an obscure fairytale that will inspire me to explore it. I just don't know it yet.

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