‘I’M uncomfortable with telling too many stories where women are passive,” says children’s author Lari Don, “and I will not tell stories where women are prizes. I really balk at the princess as a prize for defeating the monster. You do this thing and you get a girl like she was a bag of sweeties?”

We are talking over coffee in a cafe in Leith. Don, 47, has just returned from doing readings and workshops with children in the northeast of Scotland. “The unfortunate thing,” she says, “about the woman being given away as a prize in stories, is that they reflected the historical reality of life, and they still reflect a reality for some women now. But I don’t want to tell them in a way that makes them seem comfy, cuddly and safe. Stories about women being given away should only be told as if they were horrible – because they are. I’m not therefore prepared to do them for children.”

This can be problematic since one of her passions is monster-killing. The Edinburgh-based author began her career writer and oral storyteller when she began telling stories to her own children, and the theme recurs frequently in the folklore she retells for live audiences and the fiction she writes for young readers. “Monster-killing stories,” she considers, “are the best stories.”

But some of the greatest tales of dragon slaying or beast battling are precisely the stories in which girls are awarded as prizes for these acts of heroism. Such is the case in one of Don’s favourite stories from her own childhood, the tale of dragon-fighting Viking Ragnar Lodbrok.

“Ragnar kills the dragon in a really fantastic way. He puts on wool, sheep’s fleece then goes in a river to soak it and goes and stands on a mountain and freezes it so he makes himself an armour of ice.

“And then he’s impervious to the dragon’s flames for just long enough to stab it.”

All this would be good, but for what happens next, which is that Ragnar is given a young woman as reward. Don recalls that when she first began story-telling she told this tale to children. Then, one day, catching the eyes of a few girls in an audience, she realised she could no longer do this, and spontaneously had the princess kill the dragon.

The kids loved it.

It was a twist she would later feel uncomfortable about. “I thought: ‘Oh no what have I done?’ It was Ragnar’s story and I didn’t even put him in it!” The conflict she felt set her off on a journey of two parts. The first was a hunt for the stories that do exist out there in myth and folklore, in which the girls get to kill the dragons, in which Little Red Riding tricks the wolf herself or a Sumerian goddess wrestles with mountains. The result was Girls, Goddesses and Giants: Tales of Heroines from Around the World. The other was to look for what she calls the “heart” of the stories she was already telling – in Ragnar’s case, his having the “really smart idea of creating an armour of ice” – and then allow herself to jettison the more sexist elements.

Don has the air of a dragon-slayer who has laid up her spear and turned inspirational coach. She was born in Chile and had an early childhood travelling around South America, before her family settled in the northeast of Scotland. She is a former SNP press officer, and is still a keen activist.

In theory, she observes, it should be easier to create heroic female characters in her own fiction, but even there it’s not straightforward. Since the stories she writes often take characters and inspiration from legends and folklore – her Spellchasers trilogy contains a kelpie, a dryad, a sphinx and several witches – there’s a need to be on guard.

“If you’re not really conscious about trying to overturn the genre assumptions, then it’s really easy to fall into the traditional genre stereotypes as well. The fantasy genre offers a huge amount of opportunity to do new and different things. But you always have to be conscious of your source material.”

In this genre, she notes, there are books with barely a female character, while a great many that revolve around male protagonists with female sidekicks. Don always reverses that dynamic and follows a female protagonist. She is also careful constantly to analyse her characters as she goes along. In Spellchasers the central character is Molly, a girl attending a curse-lifting course who has been the victim of a curse which makes her change into a hare.

“When I made her into a hare, which makes her very vulnerable,” she says. “I thought, ‘On no, what did I just do to my female character?’ But hares are not bunny rabbits. I’ve started describing them as like super-hero rabbits, because they’re bigger, longer and so fast. Molly is not vulnerable, she’s an athlete.”

Don, of course, is not alone in doing this. Even Disney films are creating more daring and intrepid female characters. Does she think this is having an impact on the way girls view themselves? “Are girls seeing themselves as strong active creators of their own fate?” she asks.

“Yesterday in Elgin library after a reading to a group of schoolchildren, we worked on creating a story. One of the girls in the front row said, ‘One of the girls in the class is called Anita and she’s a secret kick-boxing champion and nobody in her class knew that and when the monster hurt some people in her class she revealed that she was a champion and kicked the monster.’

"I think it’s paying off. It really is.”


Spellchasers: The Beginner’s Guide to Curses by Lari Don is published by Kelpies, £6.99