When a woman’s skull turned up in Lindow Moss in May 1983, police thought they knew who put it there. So did their suspect, Peter Reyn-Bardt. He quickly confessed to killing his wife more than 20 years earlier, dismembering her body, and scattering her remains in the bog in northern England.
Then things got weird. The skull, it turned out, couldn’t belong to Reyn-Bardt’s wife—it was nearly 2,000 years old. Weirder still: eight months after Reyn-Bardt recanted his confession but was convicted anyway, another set of remains was discovered in Lindow Moss. These belonged to a man who died sometime between 2 BCE and 119 CE and may have been stabbed, strangled, or beaten to death—possibly even all three.
The apparent solution to one mystery had brought into focus an even bigger, and much older, one. Lindow Woman and Lindow Man, as they came to be known, were the latest in a string of startling archaeological discoveries made in northern European peat bogs, whose anaerobic conditions can keep human tissue from decaying. Some bog bodies, many of which bear signs of violent death, are so well-preserved it almost looks as if they’re sleeping.
Like any good journalist or novelist, Anna North, who is both, knows a great story when she hears one. “The mistaken identity part of it was just so interesting to me,” she says during a visit to PW’s offices, a plan to meet in a nearby park having been scuttled by a thunderstorm. So, too, was the idea that “you die, and then your body is preserved, and people can learn all these things about your life—how wealthy you were, or if you’d ever broken any bones, or had children. It felt really calming to me, the idea that you would die, but your body would still retain this record of your life.”
North’s latest novel, Bog Queen—out from Bloomsbury in October—opens with the confession of a husband who believes his wife’s body has been found in a bog in northern England. Agnes Linstrom, the young American forensic anthropologist called to consult on the case, soon realizes the body, which appears to have a fractured skull and a stab wound in the abdomen, dates to the Iron Age. The novel’s present-day sections, in which Agnes searches for answers to how the woman died, are interwoven with those from the perspective of the woman herself, a young druid leader who undertakes a perilous journey to the southern city of Camulodunon.
“She has a thirst for knowledge that I’m unable to not be compelled by,” North says of Agnes. The same might be said of the druid, as well as North’s other main characters. Darcy, the 18-year-old protagonist of her debut novel, America Pacifica, searches a postapocalyptic landscape for her missing mother and the dark truth about their community of climate refugees. The eponymous filmmaker of The Life and Death of Sophie Stark uses those close to her in pursuit of great art and deeper meaning. Ada, the heroine of Outlawed, a New York Times bestseller, risks her life to help infertile women in an alternate Wild West.
It’s easy to see a similar curiosity and drive in North. The daughter of a literature scholar and a scientist, she was born in Virginia in 1983 and grew up in Los Angeles. She began composing stories before she could physically write; her aunt would transcribe them for her. The one she remembers best was about a giant eyeball named Tom Eyeball who solves crimes. Later, Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series became a big influence, as did Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. “I was a pretty nerdy kid, a pretty big rule follower,” she recalls. “Then, in high school, I started doing a certain amount of pretending to pay attention while actually reading a book in class.”
After graduating from Stanford in 2005, North started a blog where she wrote about feminism and made “snarky jokes about pop culture.” She also began writing America Pacifica, which she continued to work on at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, despite the program’s focus on short stories (“I would only write them when I had to,” she admits). In 2009, her final year at Iowa, she applied to intern at Jezebel, then the premier website for snarky feminist jokes about pop culture.
“I often felt like I wasn’t quite cool enough to work there,” North says, “but I think maybe we all felt like that, to a degree.” It was also, she admits, “kind of scary. We got a ton of harassment. It’s a style of journalism where we were rewarded to be confrontational, so confrontations would happen.” Not long after publishing America Pacifica in 2011, she landed at the opinion section of the New York Times, where she covered the 2016 election. The experience made her realize she wanted to do more reporting, but crossing the barrier between the opinion section and the newsroom at the Times is hard to do. So, when Vox posted an opening for a gender reporter, she jumped ship.
It turned out to be an especially newsworthy time on the beat. #MeToo was at its height, and then, in 2018, state legislatures passed a wave of restrictive abortion laws. North spent a solid year covering abortion almost exclusively, while also working on Outlawed, which remixes western tropes into the saga of a band of gender-nonconforming outcasts from a society that violently polices women’s bodies. “The journalism headspace is really different from the fiction headspace,” she says. “When I’m trying to do fiction, I’m in this very different place that’s kind of meditative. You’re thinking about the world in this much slower and less linear way.” Still, “things that I’m concerned with in our real world are naturally going to come into the story.”
In Bog Queen, the real-world concern that most emphatically asserts itself is the climate crisis. North credits her interest in the subject to growing up in Los Angeles, a place where “you can really feel climate disaster.” Though peat bogs may not be as charismatic as the rainforest, they’re incredibly important for slowing climate change, she tells me, noting that peatlands cover just 3% of Earth’s surface but sequester 30% of its carbon.
The more time Agnes spends investigating the druid’s death, the less certain she is that she’s doing the right thing, in part because excavating the bog risks further damaging it, in part because her time in England is almost up and her future hangs in the balance. “I don’t think of her as someone who has a lot of confidence,” North says. “She has a lot of drive to do the things she wants to do. But she’s been very sheltered. She doesn’t have a lot of worldly knowledge. That’s how she came to me—as someone who was very at sea in this time of her life.”
It’s an assessment that resonates with something North says near the end of our conversation. Many of her main characters “struggle to find their place in the world or to understand how they’re supposed to act,” she explains, “and I certainly have felt that way. For me, growing up was a process of being pretty uncertain about how human interaction was supposed to work.”
The rain, which had been slashing dramatically against the windows, has let up. If North ever felt as at sea as Agnes does, it appears to be behind her now. She’s as accomplished in two fields as most writers dream of being in one. Yet traces of the discipline it required to get here, and how long it took to grow comfortable in her own skin, remain. Polite yet purposeful, she answers each question with few wasted words and no tangents. The storm, her husband texts her, is over Brooklyn now, where she’s headed. No matter—one task completed, another awaits. It’s hard not to be compelled to follow where her thirst for the next great story takes her.
