During the summer holidays at the age of sixteen, I spent a heavenly six weeks grinding freeze-dried honeybees into powder in one of Warwick University’s science labs. I’d captured the bees myself, bedecked in a white suit and mask, from a local beekeeper’s wildflower meadow hives.
Once they were thoroughly decimated with a pestle and mortar, the powdered insects were poured into vials so their DNA could be extracted. I wanted to track down the honeybees’ origins. Not their recent Warwickshire origins, but their deep-time, historic ancestry.
Last week I was on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row with Samira Ahmed to review the new Apple TV show Extrapolations by Scott Z Burns, and the Royal Academy of the Arts exhibition Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers.
There’s still time to catch up on my current serialised novel The Loneliest Girl in the Universe, which is being sent out in tiny bite-sized chunks by email. Start here from the beginning.
This is such a cool idea. Just like Daily Dracula last year, Lauren is sending out a chapter at a time of The Loneliest Girl in the Universe, a brilliant and haunting novel about space, on the date of the diary entries for free. I really recommend signing up as the book slaps. https://t.co/HhtbQmIMDV
Wren James is the award-winning British author of eleven science fiction & fantasy novels, including The Quiet at the End of the World and The Next Together (previously published as Lauren James). Their books have sold over 200,000 copies in ten languages, and The Loneliest Girl in the Universe was optioned for film by Amazon MGM.
Wren is a story consultant on Netflix’s Heartstopper, which was awarded an Emmy for Outstanding Writing. Also a RLF Royal Fellow, Wren is the founder of the Climate Fiction Writers League and member of the Society of Authors’ Sustainability steering Committee. They work as a consultant on climate storytelling with a focus on providing optimism and hope.
They have won the Sustainable Story Award and been shortlisted for the YA Book Prize, Carnegie Medal and STEAM Book Award.
Wren’s writing has been described as ‘gripping romantic sci-fi’ by the Wall Street Journal and ‘a strange, witty, compulsively unpredictable read which blows most of its new YA-suspense brethren out of the water’ by Entertainment Weekly.
Their latest titles are Last Seen Online, a crime thriller set in the world of fandom, and The Victors, a cosy fantasy graphic novel illustrated by Beth Fuller.
Wren was born in 1992, and has a Masters degree from the University of Nottingham, where they studied Chemistry and Physics. They run a Queer Writers group in Coventry. Follow them on Instagram & TikTok at @wrenjameswriter or find out more at wrenjames.co.uk.
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Wren James 