Princess (Apparently) A Conversation With Siren Knight

A bit about the book:

One summer, two boys and a secret that could change everything…

Two weeks ago and a few thousand miles away, Della was just a normal teenage girl. She didn't fit in at her posh school in London, she didn't think her crush would ever like her back, and she certainly didn't know anything about a Caribbean royal family.

But when a video of her protesting goes viral, she receives a royal invitation that changes everything. Now, she's at a lavish ball in a Caribbean palace, caught in a love triangle with her best friend and a dreamy islander, and discovering dangerous royal secrets.

With so much at stake, the last thing Della needs is to find out that her connection to the royal family runs far deeper than she ever imagined…

Today, we’re welcoming Siren Knight, author of Princess (Apparently) to the Storymix blog! We’re also celebrating the official launch of season two of our podcast Storymix: Craft and Conversation, with Siren as a guest in the first episode. 

We spoke to Siren about writing mixed-race identity, the ‘sliding door’ of history, how teaching teenagers in a classroom has influenced her writing, and her experience working with Storymix. Princess (Apparently) is out now, published by Usborne. 

When you were a teenager, what kind of books did you love the most?

The book that first changed my life was S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders. It resonated with me in a way that nothing else had. I completely fell in love with the characters. Followed closely by Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses. I read those two books within six months of each other. I was 14, and they both just changed everything. They blew my mind. During Noughts and Crosses, I cried to the point that my mom called upstairs to ask "What is going on?". It was just amazing, and obviously with Noughts and Crosses, it's such an important piece of literature where we look at the what if, which also happens in Hinton's book. What if things were the other way around, and it was the white community who went through what the Black community went through. As a concept, it absolutely blew my mind, and plus it's just so romantic, and at that age you feel everything so strongly. Malorie Blackman has this amazing way of really capturing how teenagers feel. It just resonated with me so highly.

Where is your favorite place to write?

I am a coffee shop writer. I like to have something else going on while I'm thinking. I love seeing people and hearing the hustle and bustle of life around me. Sometimes I'll need a background character, and I'll look up and I'll see someone with red hair and think, "Oh, you're going in the book." It's so inspiring to be around real life.

A lot of Princess (Apparently) was actually written in Tunisia, because that's where my husband's from. And, as I was always going there to visit him at the time, I would sit in the coffee shops there and write. The coffee shops there are amazing. It's like their culture is centred around coffee shops, and everyone's there and it's hustling and bustling and it's just brilliant. It was definitely the vibe that I loved having to put into Princess (Apparently).

Tells us a bit about the main character Della, and where she starts off in the story. 

At the beginning of the story, she is in a very posh school, surrounded by wealthy people. But she doesn't actually come from a wealthy family, which makes her feel very alienated. She also just feels out of place. She's pretty much the only mixed-race person or person of colour, within her school. She references knowing one other person in the school and she just feels out of place, you know? Her best friend's white, her dad is white, her grandma is white, and she exists amongst all these people, and she's half black. She needs to feel some kind of connection to the whole part of her that is screaming out for it. I think, talking about mixed-race, it's really hard not to refer to it as half and half, and quarter, and we want to move away from that type of language.

We've got all these massive streams of really big topics running through the story that we're trying to navigate, but without it being a lesson, which is the biggest thing. And as you said, Storymix is all about launching people who have been underrepresented in the past. When reading books or watching TV with characters of colour, I always sit there and I think, "Who is this book for? Who is this for? Is this for white people to understand Black people? Why is that our audience?" And I think that was something I was really conscious of while writing this story. We exist. And I think Della really represented that for me because I never read a book with a mixed-race protagonist until I was maybe sixteen, seventeen. As a child I never, ever saw one. And do you know what's worse? I never recognized that I wasn't in those books.

The book also plays with the idea of a ‘sliding door’ in history. Can you tell us a bit about that?

So, the Caribbean island that Della ends up at is called St. Antonique. What's unfortunately fantastical about the book is that the royal family are all of Black descent, all the lords and ladies are Black.

Growing up in England, we go to a lot of stately homes. You're looking at all these pictures of some really old people, and they are not Black or Brown or any other color. And I remember having this thought of, “Did I even notice? Was I allowed to notice? Did we allow ourselves to feel rage against it? Did we allow ourselves to think about what should be different here?”

We didn't see ourselves represented in that way. That really helped me to write the book because it was visiting something that I would not have thought about as a teenager, and maybe hadn't allowed myself to think much about since.

It was so cool to imagine a palace that had pictures of Black royalty and Black lords and ladies, and what that culture would look like. It was a beautiful thing to immerse myself into. 

Can you tell us about your experience working with Storymix?

My short story had been published by an American e-zine. And Jasmine found that work and jumped in my DMs and introduced me to Storymix. I'd never heard of book packaging before, I didn't really know what a packager did, and I remember thinking that you opened up another chapter I'd never thought about. I remember we said we’d talk about it at another time and it just hadn't happened at that point.

Time had gone on, and then I entered a competition to go to the British Black Book Festival with the Jericho Prize. And I won! And we realised we were going to the same event, so we thought we could catch up there, but we ended up being two ships passing in the night because the event was so busy. I ended up meeting Ashley Thorpe, I introduced myself to him online and ended up having a nice chat with him. Now, unbeknownst to me, behind the scenes at the Black British Book Festival, Jasmine was recruiting Ashley, or interviewing him, to be the editor at Storymix.

Talk about cosmic alignment, divine intervention, whatever you want to call it, but us three got brought together. And so when Ashley was offered the job at Storymix, and obviously accepted it, the first project was all about exploring a mixed-race protagonist. And I was the person that both of you had spoken to, had read my work, and I remember Ashley being like, "This is yours." Ashley had read my first few chapters of my YA, because that's what I sent him when I jumped in his DMs. So, he knew that I had that sort of a lighter side to my writing if I chose to use it. Obviously I am so, so happy that you both agreed to hand me the project.

As someone who teaches teenagers, what do you think we get wrong about creating books and media for them?

I think not trusting the intelligence of teenagers is something that I often see. They don't need to be beaten over the head with certain things. I think at the moment, Gen Z are getting really bad reputation of being the people no one wants to work with. But they've got it right. They are the ones saying, "I don't want to sit in an office chair for eight hours, and you're not going to make me do it." I wish millennials did it, you know? I am so on their side, and I'm so proud of them for saying, "This is silly. Why would I want to do that with my time?"

Instead of it saying, "This is how it's always been, and this is what we've got to do," we should be in support of them, because we’ve all felt like that.  I think that at the moment we've still got the older generation who are trying to make them submissive into a life that they don't even like. And this generation is really aware of what they don't want, and that is so powerful.

Princess (Apparently) is out now! You can get your copy on Bookshop.org. You can find Siren on Instagram as @sirenknight and on TikTok as @sirenkn1ght. 

Click to order your copy now!