#33 Author Will Dean talks about his deaf lead character, Tuva

This was recorded on World Book Day, and neither me or Will mentioned this, despite being at my daughter reading in school earlier in the morning.

Will Dean is one of my favourite authors. He writes a crime series based in Sweden, where his main character is deaf. 

Will explains the inspiration for developing the character of Tuva Moodyson and how he researched her (with a lot of help from @deafgirly from Twitter).

We discuss the importance of having more positive characters with a disability as well as how the books have been received by the deaf community.

Also for the bookworms like me, we talk books, inspirations, desert island books, characters

Oh and there is an exclusive about what's next in store for Tuva Moodyson, plus an introduction to Will's next book

Please follow our podcast on your chosen platform if you like the episode and give a few of our previous episodes a listen.

When Will isn't walking Bernie, he can be found on Twitter @WillRDean

Voiceover for intro and outro by Jennie Eriksen | LinkedIn

Music granted free of charge very kindly by Music: https://www.purple-planet.com . The track is called Hope and Inspire.

Transcript

Scott Whitney: 0:48

So here we are back with the All 4 Inclusion Pod. My guest, as I mentioned last week, is an author called Will Dean. Now, my, my research pre podcast research this week, and we'll see Will hopefully tell me I've got four out of four right? Will studied law in in university, he lives in Sweden, which we've already confirmed. That one's definitely right. His best friend is Bernie. And he's the wearer of a beard, which I can see. So I've got at least two. How have I done Will?

Will Dean: 1:25

You've got four outta four, Scott. You've done. Brilliant.

Scott Whitney: 1:29

Perfect. Perfect. Do you mind giving yourself a little bit of an introduction to everyone

Will Dean: 1:34

Of course. Yeah. First of all, thank you, Scott, for having me on. It's a, it's an absolute pleasure to be talking with you. My name, as you said is Will Dean. I live here in the wilds of Sweden, so I live in a clearing, in a big forest, a big moose forest, and if I walk outside of my cabin now I can hike for about a full day in any direction. I'm still in the same forest, so I live in a very quiet. I'm a hermit effectively, and and I write and I never thought I'd be a writer. I'm from the Midlands, from the East Midlands. Grew up in a house with no books, no readers no books in the house whatsoever. But my mom bless she would take me to the library when I wanted to go, and she would let me borrow as many books as I could, so as a big reader. But I was just a very shy, awkward kid, and I never expected to be a writer. And then when I was in my kind of mid 30's I got this notion, maybe I've got a story to tell of my own. And I started writing and I didn't tell anyone cuz I thought it was a stupid, I don't know, I didn't think people from my background could become writers and everything went bananas from there on my debut was completely like unexpected in terms of, I signed with a small publisher with a small deal and I'm very transparent about that. We had very modest expectations and it just became a big word of mouth thing the word of mouth took over and that was Dark Pines back in 2018 and since then, I've written another four, Tuva Moodyson books. I've got plenty more under contract that are still to come. It's gonna be made into a TV series. And I'm writing standalone novels as well. So I'm, I never expected this, but I'm here in the woods writing and I'm, I feel very lucky.

Scott Whitney: 3:09

Excellent. Do you min d the Tuva Moodyson series, which is the series we'll be, we're speaking about most. Do you mind giving a bit of a, an introduction to readers around Tuva and what happens?

Will Dean: 3:21

Absolutely. Yeah. So the Tuva books came to me one night back in, I think it was 2015, and just before I went to sleep, I had this vision in my head of this vast elk forest that seen from above, from an aerial point of view, and I zoomed down. I looked down in my mind's eye and I saw a gravel track snaking through the pine trees, and I zoomed in a bit more and I saw this big pickup truck and I looked through the driver's side window in my mind's eye and I saw a young woman driving this big pickup truck and she had hearing aids. and that was my prompt. That's where it all came from. I, it was such a strong image for me. I was like, who is this person? Where is she driving to? Where is she driving from? I wanna know more about her life and her job. So it turns out she's she's a journalist. She's the only full-time journalist at this small town newspaper in central Sweden. In this little hillbilly town, this little rural town, which is a bit like Twin Peaks. It's a very odd place and it's very rural and isolated, and she doesn't want to be there. She's a big city person. She likes Stockholm, she likes London, she likes New York. She has got no interest in this tiny little town of 8,000 people, but her mom is getting older and she's ill. So Tuva is there to look after her, but what Tuva is she's basically a very ambitious, feisty journalist. She's a newspaper reporter. She gets in people's faces, she gets the stories, and her role really is to do. It's, these are crime novels. These are thrillers that are tense, but really they're about doing the, doing justice to the victims of crime. What I'm really obsessed with is not the crime themselves, but the ripples, the effects in the community in a small community, and that's what Tuva is all about. She's about doing her research, interviewing people sensitively and writing the stories as best she can. And she, Tuva is great. She's so much fun to write because she's braver than me, she's funnier than me, she's feistier than me. She's terrified of nature, which I'm not like, she doesn't like the deep forests and the wolves and the bears and stuff, which I understand. But she like in terms of getting the job done and dealing with people, she's fantastic at that. So she's a joy to write and I'm after, I'm writing book six right now and I'm gonna write book seven next year. And I still don't really understand her that well, which is why I'm fascinated by her. She's really complicated, really acidic, very loyal, really got a close small group of friends and mentors She's fascinating to write and I'm still figuring her out and I think by the time I get Tuva Moodyson book 25, hopefully I'll understand her a bit better.

Scott Whitney: 6:01

And what I like about the book, she said It's a small town of 8,000 people, but as you go through the books, that map grows out and the characters grow with it. So there's more characters getting introduced as you go through who, who hang around. it's almost just it's one part just expanding and getting bigger and bigger. So what research did you put into Tuva? Because obviously she's deaf, so she's a hearing aid wearer and you obviously want that to be as authentic and genuine as possible.

Will Dean: 6:39

Yeah, that, that was the most important thing for me when, as soon as I knew what I was gonna write, I was like, oh my goodness, I've got a big responsibility here to do I can't just skip through this and make mistakes. I need to do her justice. So I did a huge amount of research before the first one, probably six months research, reading deaf bloggers, watching deaf YouTubers talking to deaf people, and just making sure that I got those details as right as I possibly could. And then once I had finished the, I dunno, the fifth or sixth draft, I asked a deaf friend of mine, she's on Twitter as Deafinitely Girly if she could do an accuracy read if she wouldn't mind having a look. And she was generous enough to say yes. And she read it and she always comes back to me. She's read all of them now. She's my accuracy reader for all the books and she's absolutely brilliant. And she'll come back with four or five little tiny things that I could never have dreamt of. She's just amazing. And that just adds that level of authenticity that I can't quite get to. So I feel like we're a team and we've been on radio Four together, I think it was last year on open book, talking about this, talking about the process of how it works with an accuracy reader. And she's she's fantastic and I thank her in a, in the back of every book and she's awesome. And she would be quite keen, I think, to play Tuva in the TV series. So we'll see.

Scott Whitney: 7:58

Yeah. Cause I think like representation is so important. So people when they're young, or people when they're not so young, need to look and see people like themselves or read about people like themselves. So getting that accuracy is right, because if you don't. You can almost close out a certain percentage of what your audience could be.

Will Dean: 8:22

A hundred percent. Can I just say something about that? I get, I'm lucky enough now, having been a few years in, I get a lot of letters. I get a lot of emails from readers from all around the world and that I, that always touches me to get a letter. Somebody spent the time to write about this book, about this character, but the letters I get from deaf readers really hit me the most and I'm always, I don't know, a bit overwhelmed and so grateful that they've spent the time to read the book and that they connect with Tuva in some way. They like Tuva. That means a lot.

Scott Whitney: 8:51

Yeah, that was actually what I was just moving on to. It was about the feedback you, you get from people across, any kind of person, but especially people who are in the deaf community. And I expect that will then expand more when it's on television because people. Some people don't read books. So obviously when it's on TV people will be able to see Tuva as well as as well as read about her.

Will Dean: 9:17

Absolutely. Yeah. When I do live, when I do like festivals, in-person festivals I'm always very touched by deaf readers who come up to me and we have a chat about the books and we chat about Tuva and they know Tuva so well, because it's been many years since I wrote the first one, Dark Pines. And they know the books inside out which is amazing. And yeah, I think My job is to tell these stories the best way I can basically, and to keep going and expanding that universe. Like you said, the setting is growing a little bit book on book and that definitely happens with the next book as well. So yeah, I'll do my best.

Scott Whitney: 9:53

Excellent. And then looking at kind of authors books in general, do you think more authors can do more to include, positive disabled characters in their books? In their stories that they create?

Will Dean: 10:09

Yeah, I think so. I would love to see that because I think, although Tuva came to me in that image, that was probably a result of subconsciously feeling over the years. Wow. I never really see, I've got deaf friends, but I never see and hearing aid users in my family, but I never see that portrayed on TV or in a book. And why is that's so strange that it's not portrayed more yeah. I think that would be a good development. I love finding a new author in my genre or in any other who's, who writes about someone with that experience, that's always a good thing. If they're, if if they're write, if they're writing it then that's something that I will prioritize in my reading list. For sure. Yeah. It needs to be, that representation needs to improve across the board. Not just books, but tv, movies, the whole thing. And I think that's, it's moving at a glacial pace, but it's improving with time. Yeah.

Scott Whitney: 10:58

What was your kind of inspiration to, to get into writing in the first place?

Will Dean: 11:03

I, like I said, I think for my whole life I just thought of myself as a reader and I expected just to be a reader and then I think I needed to reach a certain level of confidence. Maturity before I could even consider it. Like in my, you hear about these debut novelists who get big book deals in there when they're 21. That was not me. Like I, I was not confident that anybody would ever wanna read something that I wrote at that age. So I think it just took me took me a long time to get the confidence to think that I could write something and then, I just had very modest expectations. My plan was just to hide away in the forest. Cause I do, I'm very introverted, so I'm very happy here in nature with my dog and just trying my best and learn. And I'm very inspired by people like Cormac McCarthy, who over in America, I know, he hides away in a academic institute in New Mexico and he's just trying to improve and he's 90 years old and he is just trying to improve his craft and he, it's not really about the result of it in terms of the success of each book. I try and shut that out as much as I can. I'm just trying to improve in terms of my storytelling and. My inspiration for that really is Stephen King's book on writing, which I read every year. Reread every year. He's just shut everything else up, turn the TV off. If you wanna be a writer, you gotta write, you gotta read. So that's, I follow that guidance. I try and read as much as I can. Audio books and physical books and put my all into it. I I think I feel my way through. rather than thinking my way through stories, it's not like I'm not trying to impress anyone with my prose. That would be nice. That's a nice add-on, but that's not why I'm writing a story. I'm writing a story cuz I wanna get to the heart of the matter and I want you to feel it. Like I want it to be an immersive experience in the same way as when I was a kid reading the Narnia books for the first time, stepping through the back of that wardrobe into that snow. I want to gift that to to reader us. Cuz that's what I love when I'm reading a book. I want to feel like I'm in a different world.

Scott Whitney: 13:07

I think from my opinion, you definitely get it because, I can imagine what my opinion of the road is coming down into the town with the with the McDonald's sign, and then the big, steeples of the of the licorice factory. I'm trying to say things and not. Give any kind of plots away, I don't think I have with those descriptions. But yeah, I think I've got a picture of what it looks like, which which, when the next book comes out, you'll see that and then you'll see it again, grow and and grow from there. So you've got a, you've got a new book coming out, which isn't part of the Tuva series. Cause you've done, this will be your third standalone, won't it? That's right. Yeah, can you just tell us a little bit about about the new one, if that's right? Will

Will Dean: 14:01

I can yeah. The new one comes out in May and it's called The Last Passenger, and it's about a 50 year old cafe owner, a woman from Doncaster. Her name's Caz Ripley, and she's going on a ocean liner for the first time in her life, her first holiday, really in her lifetime. From the UK to New York, and it's got like a thousand passengers, 600 crew. And she boards this ship with her new partner, Pete, and they have a great first night together. They go out for dinner. They have a walk on deck. They go out for a drink and then they go back to their cabin. The next morning she wakes up and he's not there. and she walks out into the balcony and he's not there, and she goes into the bathroom and he is not there. So she walks out of the cabin into the corridor and all the other doors are wedged open and they're all empty, and she goes down into the lobby, there's nobody there. She walks around the whole ship and she realizes that she's steaming out into the mid-Atlantic and she's the only person on board.

Scott Whitney: 15:00

Wow. So I took a little bit of time then to to speak because I felt it was a dramatic pause moment,

Will Dean: 15:10

it was, it's the first book I've ever written where I can sum it up in a couple of sentences, so it, that's quite fun. Yeah.

15:16

Yeah.

Scott Whitney: 15:17

Excellent. So that's out in May so yeah, so I'll look forward to to having that come through my come through my door. So not including anyone in any of your books, who is your favorite character and why?

Will Dean: 15:31

That's a tough question. So many. I'm a big fan of Danny and Danny of the champion of the world and his dad. Just the fact that book opens first page, I read it with my son last year. That opens with the fact that Danny talks about his Mum dying when he was a baby, and it's such a powerful opening for a children's book. And then he starts talking about how amazing his Dad is at looking after him. And just the way those two have that connection in that little tiny caravan and the way they look after each other. It's not just in one direction and the way the Dad does what he does what he can for his son and tries to, in their limited way, tries to give him a sense of adventure. And the boy always feels safe with his Dad. That always touches me has done ever since I was a kid. On the counter to that in the other. Extreme Anton Chigurh from Cormack McCarthy's, No Country for Old Men. You couldn't get two more different characters. But that guy absolutely terrifies me. I think he's one of the best antagonists ever written. I dunno if you remember, I can see in my head right now, I can see the movie scene in the gas station where he's got a coin to toss and he's deciding for the the guy who runs the gas station, whether he is gonna basically live or die on the basis of a coin toss. So in terms of like noir and crime, I think that character is fantastic. Yeah.

Scott Whitney: 16:54

And you've mentioned call Cormac McCarthy twice. Was he a one of your inspirations as an author?

Will Dean: 17:02

He is. Yeah. I love his prose and I love how bleak and dark his books can be. And then they have these piercing moments of light and beauty and love in them. I just think he's one of the best. But I also love, Sarah Waters, Liz Nugent Ian Rankin. Shirley Jackson Yaa Gyasi. I've got lots of favorites.

Scott Whitney: 17:20

Yeah. I love listening to who, who inspire authors because then. it opens up another set of books for for people to read. And I've not read any of of Cormacs books, but I am likely to pick up his, I think it's his latest one. Is it called just something like the Passenger or, but it is, yeah. Yeah. And it's written from the book is twice in a sense where it's written from two characters perspectives. Have you read that one?

Will Dean: 17:54

I haven't. I've got it, but I'm saving it because I know how old Cormac is and I'm just terrified of running out of his material. So I'm gonna save it. I dunno how long for, but but The Road, which is my favorite book of his, which is really short. I probably read it 15 times. So I like rereading. But yeah he's especially his later books are fantastic.

Scott Whitney: 18:16

Excellent. And then I like to do things in four because it's All 4 Inclusion and trying to word it so it's a way, like I haven't stole Desert Island discs from bbc, but blatantly, like I'm not creative enough to think of anything other than Desert Island books, so it probably is very steely of me. But what four books would be your kind of Desert island books?

Will Dean: 18:41

That's not an easy one. Okay. I would probably go with Home Going by Yaa Gyasi, which I think is a masterpiece on writing by Stephen King cuz if I'm writing on that little island, I need some kind of reassurance and he always gives me a lot of confidence. I'll go with the Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, which is this gothic ghost story, which is brilliant and properly scary. And then finally, I need something massive just to get me through those days. So I have a, I have the complete collection of Sherlock Holmes here in the cabin, which I dip into in the dark winter months when it's minus 30 over here. So I think I'll take that one as well. That's my four.

Scott Whitney: 19:20

So minus 30, that's. That's cold. I'm in Manchester and we get minus single digits and that's cold, but minus 30 must be Wow. What was it that attracted you to Sweden?

Will Dean: 19:37

My wife is Swedish. That's a big part of it. So we met 25 years ago. Yeah, and we lived in London in a little pokey one bedroom flat for 15 years and we could barely afford that in London. And we knew we'd never be able to have a little house or a two bedroom flat in London cause the prices are crazy and. I found this place on the internet Christmas day, this bit of land Christmas day, 2008 I think it was. And it was cheap. And it had been on the market for years cuz it was just a swamp, it's a bog. There's nothing here, no road, no planning permission, no anything. And it was dirt cheap. So I said to my wife, can we RyanAir over and just have a look at this and see if it's got any potential? And she was like okay. And we went over and the real estate agent was so keen to sell this place that he picked us up at, the airport drove us in and it was snow on the ground and he couldn't drive all the way in cuz there's no access road. So we had to stop and we had to hike up and then we got here and I was like, yeah, I wanna live. It feels right for some reason it feels right. So we built this cabin, it took me like, probably three years really to build it. And we drilled a well for our water and we heat and cook with logs that I chop. So it's a very. Simple life really. It's it's tough in the wintertime, but whenever I travel now to London or to the States or to Hong Kong for a book event, I can't wait to get home just cuz it's so silent. It's a good place to concentrate.

Scott Whitney: 21:04

Yeah. Yeah, I can I can imagine it's almost like the dream cabin holiday, but you've got it almost 365 days a year.

Will Dean: 21:15

I think so, Scott, most people would say it's a nightmare just cause we've got wolves outside, We've got, it's so incredibly dark and we haven't had a takeaway now for 10 years. That's the problem. I miss that.

Scott Whitney: 21:28

Have you had any kind of encounters with animals or anything coming close, or are they, do they just stay right away?

Will Dean: 21:36

Before we had Bernie, the big St. Bernard, we had a lot of moose. We had moose walking through every few weeks we had a big moose walking through and they're quite, they can be quite dangerous. Depending on the time of year, depending on if it's a mother with young we have wolves in this area, but not many. And they tend to stay away. But I have heard them a couple of times and that sound of them howling is quite something. Yeah. For me as a guy from the East Midlands, it was quite a shock the first time I heard that. When we flew in to build this place, the first, one of the first times I flew in we hiked, and I found a moose leg on the grass. Where we exactly, where we're gonna build the house, like a full leg, like a big, long, gray, hairy thing. And my wife was like, wow, just deal with it. So I have to go and throw it away. But it felt very strange. You don't get that in a lawn in the UK in a big piece of grass. But we haven't got bears down here, thankfully. They're about. An hour or two further north. The bears are where Tuva lives. Yeah.

Scott Whitney: 22:35

Yeah. Perfect. And then just to finish off, is there any kind of teaser that you can drop in without giving too much away about what is in store for for Tuva?

Will Dean: 22:50

Yeah. I'm gonna give you like a World Exclusive here. I think so. I'm just working on the next Tuva book right now. It'll be out next year and I can't tell you the title, but it's set in, it's set much further north in Sweden. So she leaves Gavrik and it's set in a very strange. Very small town in a, in the mountains in the, in a ski resort that isn't really used for skiing anymore. And a lot of bad things happen in this town. And Tuva is there trying to put the pieces together so she doesn't have her backup that she normally has. She doesn't have Tammy. She doesn't have Lena, she doesn't have the local police and Tord. She has to do it all from scratch, which is quite a challenge. And it's probably the most tense Tuva Moodyson book I've written so I'm enjoying it a lot.

Scott Whitney: 23:37

And it's expanding that universe. Quite some as well then with the with the move.

Will Dean: 23:44

Very much yeah. Which is fun cuz I get to create a whole new set of characters that Tuva can interact with. But I think in the beginning, in that book, she's very, she feels very alone and isolated because, partly because of her deafness in Gavrik in her hometown. She doesn't have a huge circle of friends cuz she doesn't feel comfortable having conversations with 20 people at once in a bar. But her friends that she does have, she's very close to, they're like family, so it's quite strange for her not to have that in this new town. But she soon. makes good connections and yeah, she has a lot to deal with though, Yeah, I feel quite guilty.

Scott Whitney: 24:20

I th I think that's a kind of theme, like of an emotion that Tuva feels of being alone and isolated at different stages, maybe through each book as well. There's times when she's asleep in the shed in one of the earlier books where again, I felt she, she had that kind of isolation feeling.

Will Dean: 24:42

That's very true. Yeah. That is, that's a great point. She does have that, and it does manifest in different ways in each book, in each setting, in each season. But yeah, fundamentally she does. She does feel sometimes quite shut off from the world and like she has to protect herself, put herself in a little bubble and look after herself in a certain way. And a lot of people feel like that at different times for different reasons. And she feels very real to me now. She feels extremely human and very 3d and I love writing it. Like with my standalone books, I love writing those as well, but it takes me a while to get into those characters and I'm often at the end of the book, I'm not as, in their heads as I am with Tuva. So yeah, Tuva is my lifetime work, I think.

Scott Whitney: 25:27

Excellent. So next week we will have a lady called Nausheen Junaid, who is on the podcast. She's got a brother who is autistic and is going to give us a little bit of a, an insight from a from a sibling perspective. Cause we hear a lot about people who are autistic from the, from themselves. We hear a lot about people who are autistic from a parent's perspective, but we don't a lot from a sibling perspective. So we've got we've got Nausheen on next week is. Is autism something that might feature in, in a future standalone orTuva book do you think Will

Will Dean: 26:10

possibly absolutely, yeah. I let it all happen quite organically, so it depends what comes to me in that image in my head before I write each book. But yeah, absolutely. I'm open to anything that I can do justice to, as long as I can, I feel like I'm not being shallow with it or I'm not using it as a plot. then I won't touch it and I won't do it. But if it feels like it's natural. Like with Tuva, she, it's not, the books aren't really about her deafness. She just happens to be deaf and she's actually a reporter who's doing a really good job and making an impact in her community. So if something like that comes along, then absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Scott Whitney: 26:45

Perfect. Thank you very much for coming on. It's been a pleasure to have you.

Will Dean: 26:49

And thank you for having me.

Scott Whitney: 26:51

I'm looking forward to to picking up your next one in may.

Will Dean: 26:55

Thank you very much.