Interview With Best Selling Author Taran Matharu About His Latest Fantasy Novel ‘Dragon Rider’

I recently got to read Dragon Rider by Taran Matharu, an adult fantasy novel about Jai, a royal hostage, Winter, a newborn dragon that he has bonded with. The novel is told from Jai’s point of view and tells the story of a powerful kingdom and a coup that xhanged the trajectory of Jai’s life.

I was lucky enough to interview Taran Matharu and ask him questions about the novel and all the mythical creatures the book inhabits. Matharu is a New York Times best selling author of the Summoner series and this is his first venture into the adult fanatsy genre. You can read our interview down below!

What made you want to write an adult fantasy novel?

Matharu: There’s a few reasons. I was between publishers when I wrote the first pages of Dragon Rider, and when the sample was sent out, to my surprise, it was adult publishers who were most interested. Similarly, since I have been writing for ten years, many of my readers have graduated to adult fiction, and I kind of have too! Finally, there’s a lot more freedom when writing in the adult space, from the themes to the language. 

Are there any fantasy novels that inspired you?

Matharu: Game of Thrones and Eragon have been the two novels that Dragon Rider is most compared to, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence! Although, I only ever read the first Eragon. 

Some themes that standout in the novel include racism and colonialism. Were there certain events that you turned to in real life?

Matharu: I grew up as one of the only South Asian kids at my school, and it was the 90s. So I was able to tap into my own experiences for some of that. 

Adult fantasy novels have grown in popularity over the past couple of decades. What made you decide this novel had to be an adult fantasy novel instead of a typical fantasy novel?

Matharu: To be honest, I think most folks consider adult fantasy to be a typical fantasy novel, and YA fantasy novels to be the less common genre – just my impression when meeting non-readers. They are wrong though, as YA fantasy seems to outsell adult fantasy by a large margin as far as I know. But I don’t think the above factored into my decision to write adult fantasy. 

There are a ton of mythical creatures in your novels and I always love reading about griffins and feel like they don’t get the proper love they deserve in fantasy novels. What are some of your favorite mythical creatures?

Matharu: They really don’t! Even Harry Potter went for the Hippogriff. Both my Summoner series and my Dragon Rider series include the chamrosh, a fantastic beast from Persian mythology that is similar to a gryphon, but is a hybrid of dog and hawk instead of a lion and eagle. I also like the gryphowl, which is a mix of cat and an owl – that one’s also in my Summoner series. 

When I was reading the novel, I couldn’t help but think about the size of Winter, the dragon that Jai is Soulbound to. When I read that she was as small as a cat, I thought to myself this has to be the smallest dragon I have ever come across in a book. How did you decide how big Winter was going to be?

Matharu: I have always felt it so contrived when a dragon goes from a hatchling to an adult dragon in the course of a few weeks in a book. It makes me think of the Eragon film, where they had the baby dragon fly up into the clouds, get hit by lightning and turn into an adult dragon in an instant. In the novel, my main character, Jai, has an arc that covers months, not years. I think it’s realistic for his dragon, Winter, to take at least a year to reach an adolescent size!

What I love about dragon mythology is that there is no one agreed upon lore. How difficult was it to choose what abilities dragons in your book have and do all dragons have the same abilities in The Soulbound Saga?

Matharu: Jai’s dragon is a rare white dragon called Winter, but she was born prematurely and spent much of her early years on the run. So she’s a little smaller than the other dragons in the world of Dragon Rider – but she still has a few tricks up her sleeve as a consequence of her rarity. That’s about all I can say!

Are you going to introduce even more mythical creatures in the next couple of books in the series?  

Matharu: Absolutely. It’s always fun researching world mythologies to glean the most fascinating creatures that are not yet popular in the western cannon. And luckily, the research I have already done for the Summoner series will come in very useful.

Taran Matharu is the New York Times bestselling author of the Summoner series, which has been translated into 15 languages and has sold over a million copies in English. He was born in London in 1990. Taran began to write the Summoner series in November 2013 at the age of 22, taking part in “Nanowrimo 2013” and sharing his work on Wattpad. The shared sample of the story went viral on Wattpad, reaching over 3 million reads in less than six months. In addition to Dragon Rider, he is also the author of the Contender series, out now.

You can grab Taran Matharu’s latest book Dragon Rider here!

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