D.N. Sampson
Toronto, Canada
I started reading at five, stealing books from my older sister’s room — first the Illustrated Classics our parents kept on the shelf, then Tolkien, then Verne, then Wells. That same sister, some years later, declared that my middle-school writing made her want to have her eyes eaten by a goat. I stopped trying to write for a while after that. The reading never stopped.
The Purple Blight began as a game. I’d been learning game design, wanted to build an RPG, and started laying out a world — the witches, the languages, the seven affinities, the pilgrim’s road east toward Selenmar. The lore kept thickening. The characters kept arriving with names. By the time I understood that what I was actually building was a novel, the story was already insisting on itself.
My sister passed away suddenly in 2022. The trilogy’s central thread — a young witch travelling with someone she loves who is slowly being taken by something the country has no word for — is, in part, my way of writing through her absence. I hope it does the work books did for me at five.