The Love Child of Kelly Link and Hilary Mantel: An Interview with The Beheading Game author Rebecca Lehmann

Debut novelist Rebecca Lehmann is the author of The Beheading Game, released in March 2026, by the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House.

Lehmann is an award-winning poet and essayist. She has an MFA in poetry from Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Maytag Fellow. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Between the Crackups; Ringer, winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize (selected by Ross Gay); and The Sweating Sickness. She lives in Indiana with her family, where she is an associate professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at Saint Mary’s College.

Ringer includes the poems “Elegy for Almost” and “Fever,” which were first published in Miracle Monocle Issue 10, Spring 2018. The Sweating Sickness includes the poem “Moses,” which was a Poetry Editors’ Choice in Miracle Monocle Issue 15, Fall 2020. The Sweating Sickness was reviewed in Miracle Monocle Issue 24, Fall 2025.

The Advance Reader’s Edition of The Beheading Game opens with a letter addressed to “Dear Reader,” by Amy Einhorn, SVP & Publisher, Fiction at Crown who writes: “The Beheading Game was initially described to me as the love child of Kelly Link and Hilary Mantel (with some Arthurian legend and a queer love story thrown in). Did I need to know anything more? I did not. I dove right in.”

I also enthusiastically dove right in. While I was very familiar with the history surrounding Anne Boleyn, I was totally unfamiliar with the term “the beheading game.” I soon learned that the beheading game is a literary trope. Anne mentions the beheading game as she’s in the great hall, attempting to get close enough to Henry to enact her revenge: “the tapestries, each filled with depictions of King Arthur and his knights. Here, one she’d never noticed before, of Gawain, head bent low and neck exposed, valorously showing up to receive his nick from the Green Knight’s axe. Anne remembered the epic poem she’d read as a child about his turn at the beheading game. Nay, by God, that lent me my ghost, I shall grudge thee not a grain for the grim that falleth, Gawain spoke to the Green Knight, prepared to receive his beheading, in turn, for the beheading he’d dealt that bewitched man a year before, then delighted when the Green Knight forgave him instead, when he simply scratched the young man’s neck with his mighty axe and let him walk away, alive.”

In a flashback, Anne recalls hoping that Henry VIII would let her walk away alive, but that is not the case, and she wakes up beheaded in the excellent first chapter of the novel. Lehmann’s writing allowed me to suspend my initial disbelief in the wake of a headless (but somehow living) Anne Boleyn. Chapter One ends beautifully, showcasing Lehmann the poet, with her command of language: “The small vessel drifted away into the current of the Thames. She was free. She lay on her back in the bottom of the boat, bringing her head to rest on her stomach, so that she could see the stars above her, moving slowly past.”

In fairly short order, Anne is able to steal a needle and some thread and sew her head back on. Although, not knowing exactly how or why she is alive after her beheading, she’s uncertain as to her new physical reality: “She fetched a dirty tankard off a nearby table, uncorked a keg of ale, filled the vessel, and gulped the ale down in a few long swallows … she worried that it would leak out her neck, along the healing stitches, but it traveled swiftly down her throat, filling her empty stomach.” 

The book might be called historical speculative fiction or magical realism. Lehmann did not create an entirely new world for The Beheading Game. There are magical/speculative aspects, but the setting is a well-researched Tudor England—no doubt rendered convincing, in part, thanks to the writer’s week-long trip to London. In the “Author’s Notes,” Lehmann tells us: “This novel required a large amount of research.” She then goes on to list dozens of sources, including biographies, works of fiction, podcasts, and even the Yeoman Tour, guidebooks, and the signage at the Tower of London. Lehmann also says, “this novel owes a deep debt of gratitude to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy.”

An example of historical accuracy appears in Chapter Four, “The Bear,” which exposes animal cruelty as sport in Tudor England. Without giving away too many details, the chapter doesn’t end well for the bear. However, the bear becomes a metaphor for Henry VIII: “She knew then that she must kill Henry, that he was wild and wounded, like the bear, that he was untamable, that he would hurt others, including Elizabeth, that though others might think they could control him, the could not. She must kill Henry.”

The dialogue is initially sparse in the book. In fact, there is no dialogue at all in the first chapter. But when it begins, it’s a mix of Tudor English and modern English, which makes it totally understandable—something that I found supported (instead of getting in the way of) the narrative.

Lehmann said in a book launch interview at Saint Mary’s College, “my initial thought was that the novel would be a narrative of Anne traveling around England, sort of a Tudor era Canterbury Tales, but that approach changed when Anne met Alice.” I thought the relationship between Anne and the character Alice was some of the best writing in the book, with the two first as friends, then becoming intimate. Without giving away the ending, the closing chapter was something I did not anticipate, and a satisfying ending to a great novel.

I was fortunate to connect recently with Lehmann. The following is a transcript of our conversation, edited and condensed for length and clarity.

John David Morgan: What is your writing process? How do you balance family and professional work demands with your creative goals?

Rebecca Lehmann: I’m a full-time professor, and I have two young kids. Prior to writing The Beheading Game, I was a poet. I have published three books of poetry. Poetry is the genre you can really fit into corners of your life because a poem is short. Writing a book of poetry is one thing, but you can write little pieces of a poem, in little chunks here and there, and be very successful at that.

Part of why it took me until I was forty to start writing this novel is that I was really worried about having the time to dedicate to it, and to be able to finish it. When I started writing The Beheading Game in 2022, I just became so obsessed with the novel, and with writing it, that I let it take over a lot of other things. I was diligent about chunking out bits of my schedule each week, around my teaching schedule, so that I would have time to write every week. Every break that I had I was writing; I was writing through holidays. I can remember that year’s Thanksgiving, writing the scene that takes place on London Bridge at my mother-in-law’s house, while she was serving up Thanksgiving dinner, and I was pulled away.

JDM: Yes, the London Bridge scene, where Anne gets nauseous a little bit! That was a really good scene. One of many.

RL: Thank you. I think when you’re balancing lots of things, as many writers are, if you are parenting, if you are working, if you just don’t have all the hours in a day, you need to be purposeful. On the other hand, I find that being parent of younger children gives me great determination. When I do have the time, I don’t waste any time. I just get right to it.

JDM: This is a two-part question, comparing poetry to prose. Part One: what are limitations and benefits of each (poetry and prose) that you might want to talk about? 

RL: I think poetry gave me a really good grounding; in thinking about language, a word at a sentence level, and also in thinking about non-narrative ways of storytelling, a lot of the ways poems tell stories, are through image repetition, the use of repeated phrases, those are skills that transferred really well to writing a novel. I knew I wanted to move into a longer prose form, in part because I started writing longer poems. I felt that I had more to say than I could fit into a poem. I’m still writing both genres. One of the last poems I wrote before I started working on The Beheading Game was five pages long, which is really long for a poem. Even now, I find I have a hard in limiting myself to a page and one-half poem. Which is also fairly long for a poem.

JDM: You already talked about one of the advantages of writing poetry over writing a novel, which is the idea of chunking out time. It’s such a commitment for a novel.

RL: It is a commitment. I have so enjoyed moving into writing a novel from poems. I just loved doing it; it’s been very enjoyable for me. I will say, writing a novel is such a marathon, poetry is more a sprint. A novel requires a great deal of focus and determination, just sitting yourself down writing. Some days you don’t feel like it. If you want to get it done, you still have to sit down and do it. There were so many days when I was working on The Beheading Game, I found myself thinking about word count; could I get one thousand words, could I get one thousand five hundred words? So very different from poetry, where word count is not a consideration.

JDM: The second part of my question: do you have a preference now, or do you see yourself continuing both?

RL: I’ll continue to write both. I just finished the first draft of my second novel, so I see myself continuing to work in the novel form. I don’t know that I’ll ever stop writing poetry. I love it, I’m not writing it as much as I was before I started writing novels, because novels require so much attention, but I find when I sit down to write poetry, I have more of a focus now. I find it does something different for me than a novel does. Poetry is less outwardly coherent. I’m less concerned with outward acceptance, less about making sense. And that’s a nice break.

JDM: This is a chicken or the egg question. Your poetry book The Sweating Sicknesscontains several Anne Boleyn poems. So, did you have the idea for a novel before you wrote the poems, or did writing the poems inspire you to write the novel?

RL: That’s a great question. I would say both. The Sweating Sickness draws its’ title from the 16^th century illness. In the novel, the disease swept through Tudor England, and actually killed Anne’s brother-in-law. She came down with the sweating sickness before she married Henvy VIII. I wrote The Sweating Sickness during the pandemic lockdown. I was reading the Wolf Hall books at the time, and they were really a lifeline for me. The Author (Hilary Mantel) takes Cromwell who is such a reviled character and makes him so sympathetic. The actual sweating sickness disease was mentioned in Mantel’s books. It was described as killing very quicky. There was a saying about the swearing sickness, that you could have breakfast at your own table and then have dinner with God. That’s how fast people would die from the illness. And you would either die or get better.

When I was writing The Sweating Sickness, I saw there were parallels with covid, especially early on, with a higher mortality rate. I wrote the poem “The Sweating Sickness” before I had started the novel, so that one came before. The other Anne Boleyn poems in The Sweating Sickness I wrote while writing The Beheading Game. At that point I had become very obsessed with Anne Boleyn. I didn’t want to do the thing where you write a novel and you write a book of poems and they about the same thing. The Sweating Sickness is its’ own book. Anne pops up a couple of times. There are two poems in the book, one is “Bear Baiting with Anne Boleyn,” and the other is “Flowers With Anne Boleyn,” which is the last poem in the book, and it’s about her execution. I was writing those two concurrently with starting the novel. There’s a bear baiting scene in The Beheading Game. Chapter Four is so brutal. I wanted to include things like that to set the tone, to show what a violent culture it was. It wasn’t just the beheading of people; it was a time when animal cruelty was a form of entertainment as well.

JDM: Can you tell me about the publication process? How long before the March 24^th publication date did you find an agent, reach a publication agreement, etc.

RL: I started writing the novel in the fall of 2022. I had just put in my tenure file at my job; that was a great relief. It took me about a year to write the first draft. Then I started revising, and I spent six to eight months revising before I started querying agents. I had really good luck, I got a few competing offers and ended up signing with the agent who I had been dreaming of working with, Renee Zuckerbrot. She and I went through a few rounds of edits together, then she started sending it out to publishers, and it was accepted by Crown. I think I was diligently working on this and very focused, but I also think I was lucky the book found its’ way to the right readers at the right time.

JDM: Do Anne and Alice have a future together?

RL: I think so. Without giving away too much about the ending, one of the big questions in the book is that Anne has to make a choice: about whether she’s going to abandon her mission for vengeance, or choose this other path of passion with Alice, maybe a more equal love, someone she can meet on her own terms, someone who’s love is not going to be as fickle as Henry’s was. She has to choose her daughter in the book. It was important for me to write her character that way. Obviously there’s a huge speculative element, but Anne Boleyn as an historic figure was deeply invested in her daughter, and making sure Elizabeth was primed to be an heir to the throne of England; that’s one of Anne ‘s chief concerns. She wants her child on the throne. In the novel she has to choose Elizabeth, but I wanted to leave that door open at the end, so that there was a way Anne could have both.

JDM: Your body of work now includes poetry and a novel. What are you working on now, or what do you plan on publishing next?

RL: I’m working on a second novel. It’s too early at this stage to talk about it a lot. I just finished the first draft, and I haven’t had time to go back to it. I hope to dive back into this summer. It’s very different from The Beheading Game. My next novel is definitely not a sequel, it’s something new. That’s all I’m comfortable saying about it at this point. I’m writing some poems here and there. I will probably have a fourth poetry collection together in the next couple years. I’m moving more slowly on that than I used to because novels require so much attention. 

JDM: What about creative non-fiction, or essays, anything like that?

RL: No, just those two, poetry and novels. Thet’s enough; I’m tired at the end of the day! I’m sure I’ll come back to other things in the future, but not right now.

JDM: Last question. In this interview, or in any of your previous interviews, has there been anything that you haven’t been asked, that you’d like to talk about now?

RL: I don’t know if I can think of a particular question that I haven’t been asked about the book. What I had in mind was a book where I was hoping to re-examine the story of Anne Boleyn; show her in a more three-dimensional light. Dive into her humanity and complexities in more detail, those it does have these wild speculative elements of her coming back from the dead.

JDM: That whole waking up headless opening scene was great. 

RL: Thank you. I was hoping it would land. In the novel, I didn’t want to explain exactly what was happening there. The novel is from her perspective, and she doesn’t understand. She doesn’t know why what is happening is happening, but she’s also a deeply religious person. In her religious faith, there are examples of people who come back from the dead, like Christ or Lazarus, and different saint head-carrier stories. An example is Saint Dennis who is beheaded while preaching, then pick ups his head and keeps on preaching. That’s something that I was thinking about in writing The Beheading Game. The precedent I was drawing on most heavily was that of the story of the Green Knight, which is a type of folk take characterized as a beheading game story.

JDM: Got it. Thank you. And good luck with your writing.

RL: Thank you.