Meet the Author: Emma Styles
Emma Styles writes contemporary Australian noir about young women taking on the patriarchy. She grew up on Whadjuk Noongar Country in Western Australia and now lives in London where she was born.
Emma has an MA in crime fiction from the University of East Anglia. Her debut novel, No Country for Girls, won the Little, Brown UEA Crime Fiction Award 2020 and was published by Sphere in July 2022.
Who were your heroes as you were growing up in Australia?
I was a kid who escaped into books, loved nature and the great outdoors, and my heroes were all fictional. Their stories were of life and death, high stakes and heartbreak, and this has hugely influenced what I write. Examples include the wild horses in the Silver Brumby books by Elyne Mitchell, the young women characters in National Velvet and International Velvet, and the mountain pony in The Man From Snowy River by Banjo Patterson. I loved that poem and learned it by heart. I was in awe of the confidence of that horse and their heroic ride down the mountainside, although I’d have preferred it if they hadn’t caught the wild horses at the end of the day.
Your debut novel is No Country for Girls. Can you tell us a little about it?
No Country for Girls is a Thelma & Louise-style road trip thriller that unfolds along 2000 kilometres of remote highway in Western Australia. The protagonists are two teen girls, Charlie and Nao, who don’t know each other at the start of the book. They meet in dramatic circumstances and soon find themselves on the run in a dead man’s vehicle with a bag of stolen gold under the passenger seat.
The book is my love letter to road movies, crime thrillers and the West Australian outback. I’ve spent much of my adult life homesick for Western Australia (WA) and everything I’ve written has been set there. I love a good road trip so it’s no surprise that one is the setting of my first published novel.
The response to the book so far has been incredible, the highlight of which was being chosen by Val McDermid for her New Blood panel for debut authors at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate.
We've only recently come out of lockdown both in the UK and Australia. Did this cause you problems when you were writing and researching?
Yes and no. I started writing at the end of 2018 and I managed one research trip home in early 2019. That trip took me to the Eastern Goldfields in WA with my dad. There’s a significant gold theft in the story and I wanted to research the Gold Stealing Detection Unit which is based in Kalgoorlie. It made sense to send the girls out that way on their road trip too, until I realised they were going to run out of highway too fast. I relocated the road trip north but I didn’t have time to research that route before the pandemic hit and I couldn’t get back to Australia.
After that, I relied on memories, photos, journeys in Google Street View, and the impressions of WA family and friends who were either working as fly-in-fly-out contractors in the mining industry or road-tripping around the state during the pandemic because they couldn’t travel overseas. Their input was crucial in the writing and editing of No Country for Girls, and working on the novel was a way to stay connected to the place when I felt so far away.
How did the characters of Charlie and Nao take shape in your imagination?
It’s an enduring theme for me to take young women characters who are not powerful in their lives and see what happens when they fight back. That was all I had in mind when I started. Then Charlie and Nao appeared in a writing exercise, almost fully formed, and started arguing in my head. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a vivid and immediate experience of character.
There were so many differences and potential sources of conflict between these two characters — in personalities, backgrounds and what they wanted — and I knew I needed to send them on a road trip together. Because what better way to get to know a total stranger than on a five-day road trip with a bag of stolen gold under the seat and a bunch of bad dudes chasing you? A Thelma & Louise-style story was the perfect vehicle for Nao and Charlie to develop as characters.
As a debut novelist has the experience been what you thought it would be?
I’ve been writing novels for fourteen years and you’d think I’d have formed some idea of what was to come, but I’m honestly not sure I had. The best part of the experience was the editing process. Having someone as invested as I was in this story, who already cared about the characters, help to make the book the best it could be, that was amazing.
What I didn’t expect was the rollercoaster of emotion throughout the year and a half before publication when so much is outside the author’s control. I’m grateful to the many people who supported me through all of that and I’m thrilled the book is out in the world now and getting such enthusiastic responses from readers.
Is there anything you can share with us about your latest project?
I have two possible ‘book two’ novels in progress at the moment, which definitely wasn’t the plan! Both have young women characters at their heart, and both are set in Western Australia. One is heavily influenced by the case of the Claremont serial killer, who haunted the neighbourhood where I lived in the 90s and wasn’t caught for over twenty years, and the other is a girls-on-the-run story (on foot this time) through cattle country in the Pilbara.
What is on your 'to read' shelf at the moment?
So many books! I’m especially looking forward to Dirt Town by Hayley Scrivenor, The Invisible by Peter Papathanasiou, Complicit by Winnie M Li, Better The Blood by Michael Bennett, The Yield by Tara June Winch and This Wild, Wild Country by Inga Vesper.
One thing you would love to do again and one that you definitely would not.
I’d love to visit Tasmania again. I lived there during my first year out of uni in Australia. Tasmania has an incredible range of landscapes and some truly wild places and I’d love to take my time on a road trip around the state.
Swimming lessons off the end of the Thompson Bay jetty on Rottnest Island/Wadjemup are something I’m happy to never have to do again. We did them as kids in the summer holidays and jumping off that jetty, even on a thirty-five-degree summer day, was a freezing shock to the system.
What is the best piece of advice you were ever given?
The best piece of writing advice I’ve ever had was a tutor on my crime fiction course telling me under no circumstances was I to consider what I was writing a young adult novel, that it was clearly an adult crime thriller. That allowed me to take the rein off and write exactly the kind of book I wanted to read, and the result is No Country for Girls.
Can you tell us one thing about yourself that your readers may not know?
I got my private pilot’s licence when I was in my twenties in the UK. This was an incredible experience and I loved learning to fly, but I didn’t keep it up because I didn’t have the income to support recreational flying, and neither did I think it was an ethical choice from an environmental perspective. It was a great thing to learn and I often still dream about flying small aeroplanes, but for now I’ll stick to road trips, walking on beaches and writing the next novel.