Marcus Sedgwick's "Blood Red Snow White"

Marcus Sedgwick was born and raised in East Kent in the South-east of England. He now lives in the French Alps.

Alongside a 16 year career in publishing he established himself as a widely-admired writer of YA fiction; he is the winner of many prizes, most notably the Michael L. Printz Award for 2014, for his novel Midwinterblood. Sedgwick has also received two Printz Honors, for Revolver in 2011 and The Ghosts of Heaven in 2016, giving him the most citations to date for this prize.

His books have been shortlisted for over forty other awards, including the Carnegie Medal (six times), the Edgar Allan Poe Award (twice) and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize (four times).

Sedgwick applied the Page 69 Test to his latest novel, Blood Red Snow White, and reported the following:

Since this novel is actually three novellas that intertwined, it would be asking a lot to expect one page to capture it all. But yet again the page 69 test seems to have done its thing… Here’s page 69 [inset left; click to enlarge], which rather uncannily comes just moments before the end of Part One of the book. This first part is a retelling of the Russian Revolution in the form of a fairy tale, but just towards the end, I allow the beginnings of the next story (and in fact the main idea of the book) to start to appear. And that story is the (true) love story of how the British writer Arthur Ransome met and fell in love with Leon Trotsky’s personal secretary. Ransome was a naive man in his youth; he often found himself in situations by accident, and one frequently has the idea that he himself did not know what he was looking for. Yet through chance or the unconscious of the divine, he had an unerring knack of finding just what he needed. In this case, it was the woman who would one day become his wife.

Visit Marcus Sedgwick's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Ghosts of Heaven.

--Marshal Zeringue