The author’s blackly comic breakout novel won her awards and tattooed superfans. As she releases a follow-up, she talks about growing up as an outsider – and the best advice she received from Margaret Atwood
Mona Awad was trying on a forest-green, deer-patterned dress when she realised that the psychotically twee characters from her 2019 novel, Bunny, had burrowed back into her psyche.
“I looked in the mirror and thought: This isn’t a dress for me, this is a dress for Cupcake,” she says, referencing one of the antagonists from her breakout book. “I started thinking about her, and the other bunnies,” says the Canadian author, “and I was like: I have to go back.”
For the uninitiated, Bunny is a surreal, hallucinogenic novel set on a prestigious creative writing master of fine arts (MFA) programme. Narrated by Samantha, an acerbic writer of dark fiction, it centres on a clique of saccharine students whose corny obsessions – internet hair-braiding tutorials, vintage typewriters, tiny baked goods – belie their true demonic natures. Behind the scenes, the bunnies are magically creating hunky man-bunny hybrids they call “drafts”. These darlings eventually have to be killed – literally, with axes.
