The Sky So Heavy

Claire Zorn grew up in New South Wales, Australia. She attended St. Columba’s Catholic College high school, she graduated from University of Technology Sydney, where she and studied fine arts and writing. Zorn’s background in drawing informs Fin’s own passion for drawing in The Sky So Heavy. After college, she began to focus on creative writing. The Sky So Heavy was her first novel, which quickly earned her popular and critical acclaim. Since its release in 2013, Zorn has put out three more young adult novels, a picture book for children (which she illustrated), and most recently, a novel called Better Days, which is marketed as general fiction rather than specifically for young adults. Her young adult novels have won various literary prizes. Zorn has spoken about her deep Christian faith, which informs all of her writing, but most explicitly The Sky So Heavy, where the characters discuss Christian faith and morality at length. In 2021, she released When We Are Invisible, the long-awaited follow-up to The Sky So Heavy, which continues the story of Fin, Lucy, and Max.

Zorn has mentioned in interviews that she was inspired to write The Sky So Heavy by the news regarding the migrant crisis in the early 2010s. Fin, Lucy, and Max happen not to live on the right side of the arbitrary border the government erects in the wake of the nuclear disaster, meaning that they and everyone in their region is essentially left to starve. Their plight reflects Zorn’s understanding of the Middle Eastern refugees’ situation, in which refugees arrived in Australia (and other Western countries) after fleeing crises in their homelands. In many cases, refugees were denied aid or maligned for their countries of origin. The novel also plainly reflects fears over nuclear proliferation, which have increased in recent decades after a lull following the Cold War. Finally, the novel reflects contemporary concerns of catastrophic weather events due to climate change.

The Sky So Heavy was Zorn’s first book, and in her subsequent novels for young adults, she continues to probe themes of teenage angst, disillusionment, and coming of age. Most significantly, her 2021 novel When We Are Invisible is a sequel to The Sky So Heavy and follows Fin, Lucy, and Max in their new life in the commune for which they set out at the end of the first book. Zorn’s novel belongs to a popular trend in recent decades of dystopian young-adult novels that feature teenagers thrown into apocalyptic scenarios in which they must fight for survival, the most famous example probably being the Hunger Games series. In The Sky So Heavy, Fin mentions that he’s been reading Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road, a post-apocalyptic story of survival which The Sky So Heavy imitates very closely. Also mentioned in the novel is Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, which like Zorn’s novel explores the depths of depravity to which people descend when they are removed from civilization and social norms.