A.L. OWENS

Writing has always been a way for me to make sense of the things that are harder to say out loud.
It started when I was around fifteen, writing Silent Hill fanfiction and disappearing into worlds that were darker, stranger and somehow easier to understand than real life. Eventually, I stopped writing. Life happened, and that part of me became something I left behind.
Years later, after losing my mum, I found my way back to it.
Grief has a strange way of changing you. For me, writing became somewhere to put it all—the grief, the anxiety, the intrusive thoughts and the darkness that sometimes settles inside my head. Instead of letting those feelings sit there with nowhere to go, I started turning them into characters, worlds and stories.
That's probably why my books are dark. I don't write darkness simply for the sake of being shocking. I write about people who are hurting, people who are complicated, and people trying to survive things that have changed them. There is often brutality in my stories, but there is also hope—the small flicker of light that remains when everything else feels impossible.
Writing gave me somewhere to put some of the darkest parts of myself during one of the hardest periods of my life. Somewhere along the way, those pieces became stories that other people could hold too.