Flashback to 2009 Suzanne Collins interview
In celebration of the release of “Sunrise on the Reaping,” we’re revisiting our 2009 interview with “Hunger Games” author Suzanne Collins, where she chatted about “Catching Fire” with the late USA TODAY Book Critic Bob Minzesheimer. It’s one of only about dozen press interviews Collins has done. This story has been lightly updated for style.
Suzanne Collins, author of publishing’s hottest new teen series, “The Hunger Games,” says the most common question readers ask isn’t about its violence or political undercurrents, but its budding love story.
“Catching Fire,” second in a trilogy, advances but doesn’t resolve a romantic triangle angling its 16-year-old narrator between two jealous boyfriends.
Love can wait, Collins says. “She’s got a lot of things on her plate — like staying alive and saving humanity.”
The series, filled with cliffhangers, is set in the future. North America has been devastated by war and divided between a decadent, all-powerful Capitol and 12 struggling districts. Each district must send one girl and one boy to compete in an annual televised fight to the death. The gladiators are primped by stylists and costume designers before the blood flows.
Collins, 47, has written for younger kids. She worked on TV shows, including Noggin’s “Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!”. Her five-volume fantasy about an underground war between humans and animals, “The Underland Chronicles,” is for readers 9 to 12.
“The Hunger Games,” for readers 12 and older, was inspired by Greek mythology and TV.
Three years ago, Collins, a mother of two (ages 10 and 15), was channel-surfing between reality shows and news from Iraq at her home near Danbury, Conn.
“On one channel young people were competing for money. On the next channel, young people were fighting for their lives. I was tired, and the ideas merged.”
If the Roman Empire had had TV, would the real-life gladiators have been TV stars?
“Absolutely,” Collins says. “It was mass, popular entertainment. If you take away the audience, what do you have?”
She also was familiar with the myth of the Theseus and the Minotaur, in which Athens was forced to send seven boys and seven maidens to Crete to be devoured until Theseus volunteered to go and kill the monster.
In Collins’ series, the country is called Panem, from the Latin “panem et circenses” (bread and circuses), a metaphor for popular amusements used to placate the populace.
The narrator is named Katniss Everdeen. Katniss is an edible plant, which Collins discovered in an outdoor-survival book.
Thanks to her father, who died in a coal-mining accident when she was 11, Katniss knows how to use a bow and arrow to survive, a useful skill when she volunteers to replace her younger sister in the Hunger Games.
Katniss cares about the two boys, but not in the same way they love her, Collins says. “She’s not that interested in romance. She equates love with marriage and kids, who could be sent to the games.”
Readers, however, are taken by Katniss’ romantic prospects. The Internet is filled with debates about her best potential mate. If you search Google for Katniss Everdeen, you will get 50,300 results — just one year after she appeared in print.
The first book, “The Hunger Games,” hasn’t risen above No. 92 on USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list, but it has stayed in the top 400 for an entire year, with 500,000 copies in print. “Catching Fire” has a 350,000-copy first printing, which portends a best seller.
In Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., where “The Hunger Games” is among 49 books on the ninth-grade summer reading list (students chose three), teacher Annmarie Powers says her students introduced her to the series.
It “spread like wildfire,” she says, with themes that teens are consumed with: “fairness, relationships, plenty of violence and blood, greed, hypocrisy, subservience and rebellion.”
Collins is slated to write the screenplay for movie producer Nina Jacobson. But first she has to finish the third book, saying only: “There are deaths.”
Major characters?
“Probably. Apparently, everyone is fair game.”
Bob Minzesheimer was USA TODAY’s Book Critic from 1997 to 2015, where he interviewed everyone from Maya Angelou to Stephen King and James Patterson. Read his full obituary from 2016 here.
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