Gunila Ambjörsson

ABOUT TIME TRAVEL

I work for both young people and adults, but when writing for young people, it’s all about TIME and time travel, fantasy of the kind where there’s a door between two worlds. My characters often end up in historical eras. I never write about make-believe worlds, though I love to give other dimensions to the reality we live in. And to do that it’s necessary to describe it as accurately and factually as possible. I spend a lot of time and effort on that, as well as doing historical research - it’s part of the pleasure of writing. Everything that may be checked should be possible to check. Everything presented as being a fact should also be, just that. As long as you accept just the one thing: that it’s possible to travel through time.

I’m an admirer of the British storytelling tradition, and my first production for TV, which was also published as a book; “The Mystery of the House of Silverkrona” was directly inspired by Edith Nesbit’s “The House of Arden”. My books cover time travel in different ways; from a direct transition into another time sphere through a room filled with clocks as in “The Mystery of the House of Silverkrona” to a more sophisticated approach to and play on the concept of time, in the grid above the stage of a theatre in “Silverapan”.

ASTRAY IN TIME
(VILSE I TIDEN)

Among live role- players and anachronisms in Visby; a town with a bloody history, steeped in the Middle Ages. An exotic town where the fine line between “then” and “now” seems to be nearly obliterated, at least in wintertime: where stories lie dormant just under the surface and where anything can happen. And it does. Who’s that girl who turns up among the live role-players? Is she really from the year 1361, and is it true that she chose to remain in our time?

TIME AND THE CHESTNUT TREE
(TRÄDET OCH TIDEN)

In the Old Town in Stockholm, every house is full of stories from time long gone. Even this particular book is about going back through time, though no further than to the turn of the century, to set right something that had once gone wrong. So that the present turns out to be more to one’s liking. On her way back to our own time, the main character is the same age as her parents, for a while. Even this has its consequences.

IN PRISONER OF TIME
(TIDENS FÅNGE)

the gateway leading into another time (1784) is through a video store on Rörstrands Street in Stockholm – the street where I live. And the topic is love. Unwise love, happy and unhappy. Good luck and bad luck.

TIGER HEART (TIGERHJÄRTA)
and THE SILVER MONKEY (SILVERAPAN)

unfold in an environment well known to me, the theatre.

TIGER HEART is a suspense story, about strange occurrences during a production of Macbeth at the ruins of a monastery in Roma, on Gotland.

In THE SILVER MONKEY, the question is: How could a girl who is 15 one year be 25 the next? Strong feelings shatter the time barrier… What exactly happened 15 years ago? The gateway between worlds is more sophisticated here, the grid in a large theatre in central Stockholm.