Each day leading up to the 2019 Minnesota Book Awards Ceremony, we’ll be featuring an exclusive interview with one of our 36 finalists. Learn more about these incredible local writers and gear up to see the winners announced live in person April 6.
Interview with Jacqueline West, author of The Collectors
Category: Middle Grade Literature, sponsored by Education Minnesota
How does if feel to be a Minnesota Book Award finalist?
I’m thrilled to be a finalist. In a state with so much great literature to choose from, it’s a huge honor.
Tell us something about your finalist book that you want readers to know.
When I started writing the story that would become The Collectors, I didn’t know that my main character, Van, was hard of hearing. Most of the other elements of the story were in place — Van’s collecting hobby, his life with his opera-singer mother, his discovery of an underworld filled with secretive people, odd creatures, and gathered wishes — but it wasn’t until I was halfway through the first full draft that I realized: Oh. Van wears hearing aids! It felt like the character had told me this important fact about himself only after I had gotten to know him well. And once I knew that fact, everything else in the story fell into place. All of the logic and all of the magic worked in ways they hadn’t before. It was incredibly exciting, and also incredibly scary, because I wasn’t sure I could do Van’s perception justice. But I had wonderful help with my research, from librarians to teachers to several deaf and hard of hearing students, who all get gigantic thanks in the book’s acknowledgements.
What is something you are good at that few people know about?
I used to be a minstrel and juggling instructor at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival. My juggling is pretty rusty, but I can still fake a not-too-terrible Elizabethan dialect.
What do you love about libraries?
The reassurance that no matter how many books I manage to get through, I will never run out of good things to read.
About Jacqueline West
Jacqueline West is the author of the NYT-bestselling series The Books of Elsewhere, the middle grade fantasy The Collectors, and the middle grade mystery Digging Up Danger, as well as the YA novels Dreamers Often Lie and Last Things. Her debut, The Shadows (The Books of Elsewhere, Volume One), garnered multiple starred reviews, was named a Publishers Weekly Flying Start and a Junior Library Guild Selection, and received the 2010 CYBILS Award for fantasy/science fiction. An award-winning poet and occasional actress, Jacqueline lives with her family in Red Wing, Minnesota.
