Writer, 22, the next Rowling?

New writer Samantha Shannon has gone from a teen with a dream to a six-figure book deal with Bloomsbury for a projected seven-part series of fantasy novels.

Thanks to the hype over her dystopian dark fantasy world, the 22-year-old was being hailed as the next J.K. Rowling even before her debut book, The Bone Season, was released in stores last month.

But the young Brit does not appreciate the parallels being drawn.

In a telephone interview from her home in London, she says: "I find the comparison quite uncomfortable because J.K. Rowling is one of my favourite authors and why would you be looking for the next someone when the original one is still going strong?"

A better analogy might be found with other popular teen dystopian novels such as The Hunger Games.

The Bone Season is set in the year 2059 and stars feisty heroine Paige Mahoney, a clairvoyant who works in London's criminal underworld before she is kidnapped and taken to a savage training school to develop her psychic powers.

Add a mysterious alien overlord for romantic interest and several tributes to the Bronte sisters, courtesy of Shannon's recently received bachelor of arts degree in English language and literature from St Anne's College in Oxford, and the result is a rip-roaring page-turner that is receiving reviews almost as good as the advance hype.

Britain's The Globe And The Mail selected The Bone Season as among "the best of the bestsellers" this month, alongside another dystopian thriller, Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam, while the Telegraph called Shannon's debut an "original and enjoyably escapist fictional world".

Much of the credit goes to the author's perfectionist streak. The Bone Season went through at least 20 drafts before Shannon let it go to press, and even then, she called it back at the 11th hour to change a sentence.

"To be honest, I could have edited the book forever," she says with a laugh. "It had to be perfect. It was really difficult to let the book go."

Writing has always been a passion and a love of books led her to be the first in her family to go to university.

She has "four siblings with four parents" - her father is a retired policeman, and she lives with her stepfather, a plumber, and mother, who works in a glass processing company.

From the age of 15 to 17, she wrote and sent out her first novel, Aurora, a work of speculative fiction inspired by the writing of greats such as Isaac Asimov and H.G. Wells.

It was also a deliberate antithesis to the saccharine romance of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, which Shannon says she read and liked at age 14, then disliked after re-reading it at age 17.

"I wasn't a fan of the narrator. I'm not a fan of books that have the love interest as the main theme," she says.

Aurora was never published, but it did get encouraging comments from literary agent David Godwin, who later took her on as an intern at age 19.

At work one day in the David Godwin Associates agency office at Seven Dials, she had the idea for a story set in an office just like this - only with clairvoyants and other psychic talents as employees, making a living in a different sort of London.

Encouragement from noted writer Ali Smith, then a visiting professor at Oxford, also gave her the impetus to complete an early draft of The Bone Season in 2011.

Her employers at David Godwin Associates shopped it around and Bloomsbury soon bought rights to The Bone Season and two sequels.

"My agent called me and I went: 'Wow, really?' I didn't know what to think," she says, still clearly overwhelmed by success. Later, the publishers encouraged her to expand the world into a seven-book series.

Film rights have since been sold to Imaginarium Film Holdings, co-owned by actor Andy Serkis. Shannon has not fixed a date yet for the sequel.

"It'll take me a good few years to write the second one," she says.

She is not in any rush and appreciates that her publishers are not pushing her to deliver early either.

"As I grow older, Paige gets older as well and hopefully as I mature, she matures," she says. "I'm writing the second one now with a better sense of style."

akshitan@sph.com.sg

Get a copy of The Straits Times or go to straitstimes.com for more stories.