Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Anne Fortier was born in Denmark in 1971 and grew up in the town of Holstebro in Western Jutland. Anne began writing her first novel at age 11 and submitted her first manuscript to a Danish publisher at 13.
She emigrated to the United States in 2002 to work in film. She co-produced the Emmy-winning documentary Fire and Ice: The Winter War of Finland and Russia and holds a Ph.D. in the history of ideas from Aarhus University, Denmark.
Her works include Hyrder pe bjerget (in Danish, 2005), Juliet (in English, 2010), Julie (co-written with Nina Bolt in Danish, 2013), Amazonerne's Ring (in Danish, 2013) and The Lost Sisterhood (in English, 2014).
Anne currently lives in Quebec with her family.
Anne Fortier's website
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How did you become interested in writing a novel that supposed the famed Romeo and Juliet actually came from Siena, Italy rather than Verona? What was your starting point for the novel?
As soon as I set foot in Siena in March of 2005 I knew I had to set a novel there. Even for a European the place is spellbinding with its medieval architecture and fascinating history. I was there with my mother, and I remember walking around next to her with a notepad, gathering juicy bits and pieces and wondering how to construct a story around the Tolomeis and the Salimbenis two feuding families that lived in Siena in the late Middle Ages. Then, out of the blue, my mother came across the amazing fact that the first version of Romeo & Juliet was set right there in Siena, and not in Verona. It was published in Italy in 1476 by a writer called Masuccio Salernitano, and although the story went through many hands and underwent a number of changes along the way, this was essentially the story that ended up on Shakespeare's desk more than a century later. As you can imagine, as soon as I learned this marvelous fact, I knew right away I had my story.
It's one thing to build a novel around a relative unknown ...
Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil...
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