ON GENRE
Why Literary Fantasy?
Fantasy is often mistaken for an escape.
When people hear the word fantasy, they often imagine dragons, battles, ancient prophecies or distant kingdoms.
There is nothing wrong with those stories.
Many of them are extraordinary.
But they have never been the stories I felt compelled to tell.
What has always fascinated me is something quieter.
The invisible world that already exists beneath our own.
The one we almost notice.
The one that seems to whisper from forgotten streets, abandoned churches, old harbours and the sea itself.
That is where The Tide Chronicles began.
Not with magic.
With a question.
What if the world is already more mysterious than we allow ourselves to believe?
That question led me toward literary fantasy.
Not because I wanted to leave reality behind.
Because I wanted to look at it more carefully.
Literary fantasy has never asked me to stop believing in the real world.
It has invited me to see it differently.
To notice symbolism where others see coincidence.
To recognise memory inside landscapes.
To understand that silence can speak just as powerfully as dialogue.
To accept that not every mystery deserves an explanation.
Some deserve contemplation.
Perhaps that is the greatest difference between literary fantasy and many other forms of fantasy.
The destination is not victory.
It is understanding.
The journey is rarely about defeating an enemy.
It is about discovering a truth.
Often, that truth has been quietly waiting inside the protagonist all along.
That has always felt closer to life.
Most of us are not called to save kingdoms.
We are trying to understand ourselves.
To make peace with memory.
To carry grief without allowing it to define us.
To recognise beauty before it disappears unnoticed.
These are quiet battles.
But they are no less profound.
That is why I write fantasy.
Not to escape reality.
To illuminate it.
Stories have always used symbols to express what ordinary language struggles to explain.
Ancient myths understood this.
Fairy tales understood it.
Legends understood it.
A forest was never only a forest.
A river was never only water.
A journey was never simply a road from one place to another.
Everything carried meaning.
Everything reflected something deeply human.
I wanted The Tide Chronicles to belong to that tradition.
The Shadows are not merely creatures.
The sea is not merely a setting.
The relics are not simply magical objects.
Each exists because it speaks another language.
The language of memory.
Identity.
Loss.
Hope.
Transformation.
Fantasy allows these ideas to become visible.
Not because they are imaginary.
Because they are often invisible in everyday life.
There is another reason I chose this path.
I have always believed that readers deserve space.
Space to wonder.
Space to interpret.
Space to discover meanings I never consciously placed on the page.
Literary fantasy trusts the reader.
It does not explain everything.
It understands that unanswered questions often remain with us longer than perfect explanations.
Life works that way.
We rarely receive complete answers.
We learn to live with beautiful uncertainty.
I wanted my novel to breathe with that same rhythm.
Slow enough to notice.
Quiet enough to listen.
Open enough to invite reflection.
Some readers will finish The Tide Chronicles wondering about the mythology.
Others will think about the sea.
Others will remember a particular street in Genoa.
Some may recognise themselves in The Girl.
None of these readings are more correct than another.
That is one of the greatest gifts literature can offer.
A story changes each time it meets a different reader.
Perhaps that is why I have never considered fantasy a form of escapism.
Escapism asks us to forget the world for a while.
Literary fantasy asks us to return to it with new eyes.
To notice the extraordinary hidden inside the ordinary.
The smell of salt drifting through a city street.
The echo of footsteps beneath ancient arches.
The quiet comfort of a lighthouse that has watched generations come and go.
The feeling that some places remember us even after we have forgotten ourselves.
Those moments already exist.
When I began writing The Tide Chronicles, I never asked myself how to invent a magical world.
I asked a different question.
What if the real world is already full of magic?
Not the kind that bends the laws of nature.
The kind that changes the way we see.
The kind that reminds us that memory shapes places just as surely as stone.
That love survives in quiet gestures.
That identity is discovered one choice at a time.
That hope often arrives as softly as the tide.
Perhaps that is what literary fantasy has always meant to me.
Not an escape from reality.
A deeper conversation with it.
Because the most extraordinary stories are rarely those that take us furthest from the world.
They are the ones that return us to it…
…more attentive.
More curious.
And perhaps just a little more willing to believe that beneath every ordinary day, another story is quietly waiting to be found.