It's an unexpected choice. Or I don't know, maybe the futuristic, grim nature of the story is larger than that. I wouldn't care who was the lead in a good dystopian story. You know what I mean? What's been the most memorable feedback you've gotten from teachers and kids? One of the most memorable things I hear is when someone tells me that my books got a reluctant reader to read.
They'll say, "You know, there's this kid and he wouldn't touch a book and his parents found him under a blanket with a flashlight after bedtime because he couldn't wait to find out what happened in the next chapter. The idea that you might have contributed to a child's enjoyment of reading. Who contributed to your love of reading and writing?
In fifth and sixth grade, I went to school in an open classroom. And the English teacher, Miss Vance, was wonderful. On rainy days, she would take whoever was interested over to the side and read us Edgar Allan Poe stories. And we were riveted. That made a huge impression on me. If only we could all know a Miss Vance! How do you convince the adults who are more concerned about your themes? I think it's how you present it. Kids will accept any number of things. The third book has biological warfare, the fourth book has genocide, the fifth book has a very graphic war.
And I wondered if at some point that was going to become a problem. Not for the kids so much but for parents or schools. And it never seemed to.
I think somehow if you went on that journey with me from the beginning, you kind of worked into the more violent places and were prepared by what had come before. What drew you to writing science fiction? Telling a story in a futuristic world gives you this freedom to explore things that bother you in contemporary times.
So, in the case of the Hunger Games, issues like the vast discrepancy of wealth, the power of television and how it's used to influence our lives, the possibility that the government could use hunger as a weapon, and then first and foremost to me, the issue of war.
War seems to be a very important theme for you. My father was career Air Force and was also a Vietnam veteran. He was in Vietnam the year I was six. But beyond that, he was a doctor of political science, he was a military specialist, he was very well educated. The edible tuber roots she could gather, the arrowhead-shaped leaves were her defense, and the little white blossoms kept it in the tradition of flower names, like Rue and Primrose.
I looked at the list of alternative names for it. Swamp Potato. At the heart of the books is the character of Katniss — an action heroine, whose ambivalence about herself and others does not merely decorate the story but drives the plot. It's a trick that is particularly admired by the novelist and screenwriter Anthony Horowitz, whose Alex Rider books have been one of the most successful action series in the UK over the past decade.
He says: "Suzanne Collins has pulled off a remarkable coup, producing a female character that has equal appeal to both boys and girls and it's interesting how the book manages to balance an intricate and detailed love triangle with sequences of fairly gruesome violence. It's not often you find both these things between the covers of the same YA [young adult] book. She's tough without being a tomboy and attractive without being a sophomore although she has elements of both.
Her relationship with Peeta is it love or expediency? Even she is unsure where her feelings truly lie. Though Katniss, who is 16 in the first book, is buffeted by all the familiar teen emotions — the desire to be special competing with a wish to belong — Collins insists the series is not a metaphor for troubled adolescence.
I write about war for adolescents. Increasingly, though, adults are also reading The Hunger Games, which has been energetically marketed to the valuable crossover audience. Her UK publisher, Hilary Murray Hill, dates the tipping point back to , when Collins was named one of Time magazine's most influential people , and Mockingjay, the third volume in the trilogy, was published in both teen and adult editions. There is a very grown-up political logic to the books, which become steadily more uncomfortable as they go on, ending with an ultra-dystopian society in which the rebels — Katniss among them — resort to the same power games as their one-time oppressors.
All very clever and thought-provoking," says Horowitz. The writer Michael Rosen has written admiringly for the Guardian about the politics of Collins' dystopia. I felt I was being warned and I quite like being warned. Rosen's article on the Guardian's Comment Is Free website struck a geyser of opinion, ranging from those who accused it of political incoherence and wrong-headed moralism, to those who, like a user posting as "psygone", saw the trilogy as a projection of "the subconscious fears of today's teens that their future will be more and more grim, and they will have to do the 'unusual' in order to not be crushed by it".
The best-selling trilogy was adapted into a blockbuster film series starring Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen. The youngest of four children, Collins was born on August 10, , in Hartford, Connecticut. The daughter of an Air Force officer, Collins moved a considerable amount during her childhood, living in places like New York City and Brussels.
For the Collins family, history was an immensely important topic. Much of that was driven by Collins' father, who taught history at the college level and was open with his kids about his military experience, including his deployment to Vietnam. It would start back with whatever had precipitated the war and moved up through the battlefield you were standing in and through that and after that. It was a very comprehensive tour guide experience. So throughout our lives we basically heard about war.
Eventually, Collins and her family ended up in the South, where she graduated high school from the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Collins then enrolled at Indiana University, where she graduated in as a double major in theater and telecommunications. She then went on to earn a master's degree in dramatic writing from New York University.
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