Feast While You Can authors Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta on queer horror romance and their own love story

Australia Broadcast Center

07-05-2025

Married couple and co-authors Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta have written a new book, and it couldn't be more different from their first.
Their 2021 debut was a fake-dating romance starring a straight couple, which was dubbed "the perfect summer read" by Vogue.
Their latest offering, Feast While You Can, is a gay horror-romance packed with visceral jump scares.
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But something scary is lurking in the caves of Cadenze, and the nameless demonic entity is hungry for Angelina's future.
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Not only does it infiltrate her mind and control her body, it also possesses her dog.
Only one thing appears to stop it: the touch of Angelina's brother's ex-girlfriend Jagvi, the delightfully butch paramedic Angelina's had a crush on for forever, and who couldn't be more off-limits.
Queue a forbidden, and gloriously explicit, queer romance.
The result is a story that's simultaneously hot, haunting and deep, exploring complex themes from desire, to family dynamics, capitalism, identity and belonging — all the while, subverting the commonly used horror trope that positions queerness as something to fear.
No wonder the achingly cool Berlin-based authors (who originally hail from Australia and the UK) are in the spotlight at the
ABC Arts caught up with the literary power couple to find out how they fell for each other and started writing love stories together — and why they went from penning hetero romance to spicy queer horror.
How did you meet?
Mikaella:
Oh god, it was 13 years ago [laughs]. I was doing the typical "Australian backpacks around the UK and Europe" thing…
Onjuli:
Mick was couch-surfing around, and mine was one of the couches she surfed on. I was in Bristol at uni at the time.
We spent five days drinking more than we should and talking about stories we would want to write.
After Mick left, we kept talking obsessively and met up a few times — I kind of went wherever she was in Europe.
Mikaella:
And then I had to go back to Australia to finish my degree, but we fell into this long-distance relationship.
There are many challenges [to long-distance relationships], including that you spend all day texting, which can be quite repetitive because you talk about yourselves and your lives, but you can't do anything together except talk.
So, we started coming up with these characters and writing long emails to each other where we would talk about what those characters were doing, and those characters could hang out where we couldn't.
So, the writing and the relationship started almost at the same time.
And then, luckily, I was able to move back to the UK, so we weren't long-distance for too long.
Datta (left) and Clements as babies in 2015, about two years after they met.
(
Supplied: Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta
)
How has the way you write together evolved over the years?
Onjuli:
In the early years, we were on a mission to find the perfect formula.
After [our first book,] The View Was Exhausting, we were working on another novel and we had a spreadsheet of every single scene and who was going to write it, which characters would be in it, and exactly where it would go.
When we finished it, it was meticulously done but it was soulless. It was a boring novel.
And that's how we came to writing Feast While You Can, which ended up being a lot more like, "Let's just throw whatever we want at the wall and see what sticks, and not control each other at all".
With possession horror romance Feast While You Can, Datta and Clements set out to create the perfect literary jump scare.
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Supplied: Simon & Schuster
)
That's how we ended up with a monster, themes of unbridled lust and messy family relationships, and setting it wherever we wanted to set it.
And the novel [we're writing now] has been an entirely different experience again.
Mikaella:
I'd say the one thing that's stayed the same for us is the planning.
Some characters or vibes show up, maybe a structural or thematic problem we're interested in, and then we spend months and months discussing it. Like, we'll go out to dinner or we'll be walking to the train and discussing it.
It's almost like we have these really messy friends that we really like gossiping about, like, "I can't believe she did
that
!"
And then it takes on a life of its own.
How did you go from writing a straight fake-dating romance to a queer horror love story?
Mikaella:
There are a couple of factors, and one is that we both read really widely across a lot of genres.
Like a lot of writers, we have a lot of preoccupations with certain themes.
We're really interested in power, the way the world perceives women as unlikeable, and queerness. And it's interesting to think about how we can take these themes and explore them with the framework of a new genre.
And the other is that the crossover between horror and romance is really close, because you're aiming for the same reader reaction: to give them this really physical reaction.
So, it felt like quite a natural journey.
Why do you think now is the time for queer horror, specifically?
Onjuli:
It feels like there's a pendulum swinging back around again from a more liberal-looking future to one that's more threatening and dark.
And so I think to be queer now is to always have that lingering sense of fear around you.
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A lot of queer longing and romance is centred in the future and what life could look like one day, if things were to get better — and [a happy future] is what this monster is threatening to deny these characters.
And so, in that way, I think [Feast While You Can] realises a very real fear a lot of queer people have: what if it doesn't get better?
Mikaella:
The only thing I'd add is that horror is a very telling genre — it betrays the cultural anxieties and wider political fears of the time.
Horror and queerness have always overlapped, partially because queer people were depicted as the monsters of the story.
What's so wonderful about the latest wave of horror, and I'm thinking of writers like Julia Armfield or Eliza Clark and Alison Rumfitt, is queer people being like, "OK, but what are
we
afraid of?"
How did it feel to finally write a main queer couple?
Onjuli:
It was definitely more of an intense process than we thought it was going to be.
There's a flashback scene, which shows one of the characters getting pushed to come out in a relatively conservative environment before they're completely ready.
Both of us have our own coming-out journeys that we don't think about that much anymore, because it was when we were teenagers, and we're adults now.
But writing that scene, we both had so much to say that we didn't realise we still cared about.
It was kind of a revelation to us that all of those feelings were still there, and [writing] it felt very vulnerable.
Datta (left) and Clements say Feast While You Can came to them much more instinctively than their debut, The View Was Exhausting.
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Supplied: Camila Berrio
)
Mikaella:
It was also really joyful.
We loved writing The View Was Exhausting — I'm very interested in heterosexuality as a concept [laughs] and I don't subscribe to the idea that you should only write exactly what you know, and I'm sure we'll write heterosexual couples again.
But I was so much more invested in Jagvi and Angelina and their tender, thorny path towards each other.
Onjuli:
And so much of it was instinctive. We knew exactly what we were doing and we felt very sure of it.
There's a line where we're describing Angelina looking at Jagvi and noticing this vein that runs up her forearm, which is such a butch-femme sensibility and aesthetic to point out, and our lovely editor — who is straight — left a comment on that line and was like: "Do we need this? It's a bit extraneous."
Mikaella:
And we were like, "No, it's traneous."
How did you go about writing sex scenes together?
Onjuli:
Because [Feast While You Can is] a possession horror and we both find possession very sexy as a concept, and because it was our first time writing a queer, lesbian romance, we really wanted to lean into the fact these two women are incredibly horny for each other.
The fact they want to sleep together so badly is such a massive motivating factor for both of them.
So, it felt really important to us that the sex scenes were there, that they were explicit and intense, and writing them felt natural and easy.
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Mikaella:
Yeah, when you're writing sex scenes with your partner, nothing comes as a surprise. That part is fine. The tricky bit is blocking out everyone else.
I remember, at one point, we sent an early manuscript to one of my sisters, who was visiting home, and my dad really likes being read to.
My sister messaged and was like, "I'm so excited to read it, maybe I'll read it aloud to Dad," and I was like, "I am begging you, for everybody's sake, for your sake, for his sake, and especially for my sake, please do not read it aloud."
So, the main thing with writing the sex scenes together was to commit, while also wearing a blindfold to the idea that anybody else would ever read it.
What do you hope readers take from the book?
Onjuli:
The best reader feedback we've got is from people who lost their minds over it, or were up all night reading it, or jerked off to it.
I just want it to be a piece of writing that brings a lot of joy to people's lives.
Mikaella:
And I hope it recaptures some of that energy I felt as a young queer person whenever I stumbled upon a book that felt like it was written just for me.
Even as a queer adult, I sometimes have that feeling where I'm like, "Sure, this book sold a bunch of copies, or maybe only two copies, but the only copy that was meant to be sold was to me, because this is somehow, specifically, mine".
It's that kind of possessive joy that I really hope readers find in Feast While You Can.
What's next for you both?
Onjuli:
We're still massively genre-hopping, so whatever ends up coming out next will be different again, but we're still focused on love stories and romance, and writing queer love stories.
Mikaella:
Yeah, you can look for some more lesbians coming soon, one way or another. [Laughs.]
Quotes lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
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