Daniel mason biography

Interview

Daniel Mason discusses his novel The Winter Soldier and how it was informed by his background in medicine.

It has been over 11 years since your last novel, A Far Country, was published.

Can you describe how The Winter Soldier came about?

I think it is probably closer to 14 or 15 years— I began thinking of some of the characters back in 2003, during my last year of medical school.

Daniel mason biography

But I put aside those early sketches to work more fully on A Far Country. When I finally began working on The Winter Soldier full-time, it was a very different novel from the book I eventually would finish. I had originally been drawn to World War One and the interwar period because of my interest in the early study of the art of asylum patients, and the first version of the book involved a triangle of a patient, her husband, and her doctor.

I struggled a lot with this version-- for almost six years and at least three drafts