

In celebration of its 20th book birthday today (woah) here are 9 things you probably didn’t know about SABRIEL –the first book in the legendary Old Kingdom trilogy– courtesy of the fantasy master himself, Garth Nix!

On choosing the name “Sabriel”

I tried numerous combinations of different word fragments to try and find the right name. I wanted something dark, mysterious and powerful, so I was combing things that meant “night” and “darkness” with the “-iel” and “-ael” endings found in angel’s names. I started combining the heraldic term for black, which is “sable” with “-iel”, and after a bunch of names that didn’t sound quite right, ended up with “Sabriel.”

Garth Nix didn’t keep track

I only started keeping track of when I’d typed up a chapter with Chapter Five, which was done on the Fourth of July, 1993. I’m not sure when I wrote the prologue and the first chapter, I think it was actually some time in late 1992. I finished typing the epilogue at 9:57pm on 20th April 1994.

The book was launched at Sydney’s Mortuary Station

SABRIEL was first published in Australia, on May 11 1995. The book was launched at Sydney’s Mortuary Station, which was a specialized train station that existed only to transport coffins out to the vast necropolis at Rookwood. It seemed an appropriate place to launch a book that was so concerned with Death and the Dead.

‘The Raft People’

The original chapter outline of SABRIEL has a chapter called “The Raft People”. No, I can’t remember what that was going to be about!

‘Old Ardor’

In my very early notes, the Old Kingdom was called “Old Ardror” and Ancelstierre was called “New Ardror”.

About The Paperwing

The Paperwing aircraft in the book were probably inspired by my childhood, my mother is an artist papermaker. She made lots of different artworks with paper of all kinds, sometimes with many layers of colour and texture.

The UK is late to the game

While SABRIEL was first published in Australia in 1995, and in the USA in 1996, it wasn’t published in the United Kingdom until 2002.

Sabriel is GLOBAL

SABRIEL has been translated into 41 different languages, including German, French, Greek, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Danish, Chinese (Simplified and Complex), Italian, Japanese and more.

How he named the seven bells

The idea for the seven named bells the Abhorsens and necromancers use to control, summon and command the Dead came from the confluence of two things: extrapolating from the traditional rite of exorcism by “bell, book and candle” and discovering that bells are often named, which I first realized from reading Dorothy Sayers’ mystery THE NINE TAILORS.

Read the entire Sabriel series!



