I always wanted to be a writer. My mother is a novelist and the idea was always there. I told one or two people that I was writing a novel and then worried that I might have revealed too much. The ideas for Footnotes to Sex have been germinating for a long time. I read La Batarde by Violette Le Duc at university and loved what she had to say about being a writer. When I read it again in this country, I thought I really should be getting on with my writing.

I started by writing scenes between characters; until slowly I realised that I was writing a novel. I read somewhere that it was a good idea to pretend that you weren’t writing a novel. It takes the pressure off you. I kept writing the novel, and I belong to a writing group which I find is a tremendous help. I went to hear Sarah Waters read, and I asked her to read few chapters, which I wouldn’t have done unless I’d had some feedback from her before. And when she wrote a comment for the cover of Footnotes to Sex I thought I might die at that point.

I want to write the second novel and then the third and then I might be able to call myself a writer. I don’t know where I’m going with this one, but that’s how it was with the first. I’m as obsessed with this book as I was with the first.

Mostly when I’m at home I start writing when my partner has left the house. I heat up the coffee and start the computer. Sometimes though I have to get out of the house and perhaps go for a walk. You’re still working and thinking. I like train journeys because you can do the same thing.

Amongst New Zealand writers I admire I must mention my mother Marilyn Duckworth who has been a great influence on me. I also love Katherine Mansfield who is a delicious writer.

I was writing a lot of journalism for quite a long while. When I was on the Today programme I started writing for Punch, and then for the Times. I started writing fiction when I was forty. My first novel was Casting Off . The one before Shadow Child was Love Songs and Lies, where I wanted to write an intimate epic. I wanted to have fun telling the modern generation how scuzzy and debtfree our student lives were then.

Ideas come from my life in journalism, in fragments of character. It’s often counter-intuitive. When you feel as other people feel it’s a great charge and a visceral connection. You’re never thinking about the reader when you write; you’re thinking about the characters and the story, and the thing itself. It’s only when you start the editing process that you think about the reader. This book deals with grief and the remorselessness of ongoing life. It kept striking me that life keeps forcing itself onto you. In this story the death by accident of the son is dealt with differently by the father and the mother.

I lost my own son, but this is not an autobiographical novel. I have all this knowledge and I’d rather not have had it, and rather had remained stupid, but on the other hand it has to go somewhere.

The shades of British social life and attitudes rubbing up and against each other are always funny. My heroine has been living a refined life in a Norfolk village, and one of my favourite bits is where she first experiences Dalston.

The core thing in the novel is whether people are going to be able to reconcile themselves with the way other people live. It’s nice to mix people up.

Marian has come to a resolution at the end of this novel; our own journey is very different. Our son took his own life; this is very different from Marian’s experience. I have not resolved anything that I could put into any fiction yet.

Nicholas my son was very verbal, he was interested in words from a really early age. Both children were very expressive. Rose is very funny, and Nicholas is very mystical, loved Blake, was like him in that edge of disaster way. Eight of the poems in The Silence at the Song’s End have been used in a song cycle by young composer Joseph Phibbs. This feels more like a legacy than a memorial.

I’m in California and writing for a month. I’m writing a screen play which is a bit ambitious. I’m just writing and walking which is bliss.

I started writing my own friends and companions. I had written many short stores, and then started Frozen Summer which was taken up by a publisher. It felt like a different terrain and I think a writer should take risks; you engage with the anarchic side of yourself. I went straight into the second novel because I had a two book deal. Writing my novels put me a place where I could work with other writers. I love the commitments I’ve got with courses, and writers.

I have to write; I write all the time.

Writing is all about self-discovery; we are all in our way the outsiders in our own lives, trying to find the journey of our own lives A lot of what I write are problem in my own life that I cannot solve, and I make up characters and watch how they deal with them.

My patchwork career is my strength and not my weakness, I just written two plays and saw them from page to stage.. It was strange to be sitting with friends watching fragments of my life. The screen play is now finished, and we have to wait and see what happens next.

We have irregular poetry cafes in Frome, keeping the interest up with local guests, and do a words event at a local theatre. Poetry should take to the street. There is a good performance set up in Bath and Bristol, but we wanted to do it ourselves.

It was the Liverpool poets who made me see that poetry could be funny and make you think. My father read me proper poetry not nursery rhymes, and I was really lucky about to have that.

I write my morning pages for my blog and write them on my laptop and then it’s an exercise in editing. It’s a kind of homework. Writing is a craft, and like any other you must put your stuff in order to share, and therefore I must craft it so that readers can hear what I say. I have a passion to communicate, and a passion with words.

I’ve been very pleased by the attention the novel ‘The Rescue Man’ has been getting. It’s been really positive. I started as a journalist, working in a bookshop, sending off journalism on spec. I was always mad keen on films and having been writing film reviews for ten years; it’s a lovely job.

I always wanted to write a book; I love reading novels. Novels are the great art form. In the last few years I realised my subject was staring me in the face, where I grew up, Liverpool. Liverpool takes the big non speaking part in this novel. The most important thing about starting the book in 1939 is that it’s on the eve of the most traumatic things that happened to the city. The 1860s was when huge numbers of mercantile palaces were being thrown up. There is a contrast between these two Liverpools which interested me

Liverpool got the heaviest bombing of any provincial city and widespread destruction; I felt I had a duty to say something about that. I liked the fact that not many people had written about heavy rescue where people went into bombed and damaged buildings to retrieve the wounded and the dead.

Of my two characters Tom Baines is nothing like me; a shy recessive architectural historian and looking for a purpose in life. He realises that the city he loves might be obliterated. The great resource for this book was photographs, I looked at so many through a magnifying glass and checked out the destruction. Peter Eames was based on a real architect Peter Ellis whom no-one knows much about. He built a couple of buildings in Victorian Liverpool. Eames’ diary was the most enjoyable part of the book to write.

I may have left Liverpool, but it hasn’t really left me. I couldn’t write about it until I was an exile.

The book took about fourteen months to write but it was brewing for quite a bit longer. I wrote it from Wednesday afternoon to Sunday evening. Guilt was a thing which drew me back to desk even though i wanted to be reading someone else.

I’m writing something now which is set in 1911 about a suffragette who meets a cricketer. It’s a kind of Edwardian love story. The past really galvanises my imagination. I can’t ever imagine writing a novel set in the present. The past can be pinned down and discovered. I do a lot of research but I think you can kill a book with too much information. Writing fiction is like sailing out on the open sea, and a more lasting pleasure than journalism, because you’re inventing it.’

I’ve finished a book called Winged with Death which will be published on the 13th March. It’s not really a crime novel, but a contemporary novel based in Monte Video in Uruguay in the seventies, with alternate chapters set in the north of England a little later on. When I first starting writing Poet in the Gutter it was a hommage to Raymond Chandler. I carried on with the series with Sam Turner set in York, I introduced a second series set in Hull. York is a tourist town but there are also no go estates in York just as there are in other cities, with a healthy criminal fraternity.

I’m not entirely sure where characters come from, are thy aspects of the self, or composites of people one knows? When I’m writing they’re purely imaginary. People who recognise themselves in the books are usually completely wrong. The character of Sam Turner might be a wish fulfilment for me ; we certainly share some musical tastes. If you want to give a character some authenticity it has to be from some knowledge you have.

I have a history of writing, not a professional background. I was a great reader and began writing when I was still at school. When I first left school one of the first things I bought was a typewriter. I’m a compulsive writer and i write every day. My writing regime starts as soon as I get out of bed, I was just reading that Auden quote, “Write early, wash later’. When you don’t get dressed at all that’s a good day’s writing.

I do read crime novels but it’s not my usual fare; there’s still lots of stuff from the past that is still left to read. Modern novels can be hit and miss and there’s a whole raft of stuff out there that’s stood up to the test of time. But a lot of my friends are crime-writers so I keep up with them.

Writing this novel was different from a crime novel or one from a series. It was written in the first person and the themes were for me unusual. It deals with things like dance and denial and revolution. It was much more ambitious, and it’s taken me longer to write. Crime novels come out at least once a year. This one took two or three years to write. I never know how my books are going to end, if I know where things are going I begin to lose interest. The joy of it is following the trail. A lot of the answers to the problems in anovel seem to come in dreams, and I have a notebook ready to write it all down in the middle of the night.

I’m already writing something else, but it’s difficult to talk about new writing projects. All I can say is that it’s an historical novel about the immigration of people from Europe to America.

Writing is difficult to teach. It’s one of those things you have to do. Sitting down and writing is better than going on a course. You learn by doing and you learn by reading. Read. Read. Read. And a writer doesn’t just think about writing. The important thing is putting words down on the page.

It was just one of those things, the way I started writing. I was off work with flu and I saw Richard and Judy and they were running a writing competition in Autumn 2004. I wrote the first chapter of a novel which my eldest daughter sent in a month later. In February 2005, they rang me after receiving 46.000 entries, and they said I had been long-listed, and then I was short-listed and then I had a publishing contract. I had six weeks to write it.

I think I’ve always been a writer, I‘ve always written stories and kept journals. And I worked in advertising for a long time as a copy writer. I thought that writing fiction was something I’d do when my children flew the nest.

I’m a bit of a hermit and I’m not really like Helen my central character in the Housewife books. Though I believe that one’s relationships are the most important things in life. Everything else is disposable. Friendship is terribly important to me. I think the characters in my books are a series of alter-egos.

I’m actually working on the manuscript for the fifth Housewife book, Housewife in Trouble, while I’m here in India. India makes me feel connected in some way. My mother is Indian, and I’m also working on a manuscript set in India in the thirties.

I think luck has a lot to do with writing success, and I had a great launch platform, but I feel I’m serving a long apprenticeship. i wonder whether I will ever feel worthy to be a published author. If you can take criticism and improve and improve, and don’t give up, just remember there are some real stinkers published out there.

I like watching a movie when I forget I’m watching a film. I like the same-experience when I‘m reading, to lose myself in a book. The Housewife series are designed with this in mind, to be comedy light relief.

Book review

The French Horn is the orchestra’s most difficult instrument. I stuck at it for seven years, and then dropped it. I guess I had a mid-life crisis when i was about forty, and I was feeling professionally rather unfulfilled. I thought I was going to have an adventure, so rather than buying a Harley Davidson, I plucked my french horn out of the attic where it had been gathering dust for twenty two years and took it to the annual gathering of the British Horn Association.

At the end of the weekend everyone gathered on the stage and they had what they called a mass horn blow. I said to myself that I was going to come back in a year’s time to play a solo on the stage in front to of all these other horn players. I had a great year wandering around the horn world, and in the middle of the year I signed up for this thing in America called Horn Camp. That was a gift for a writer. At the beginning of the quest I didn’t know I was going to write a book, though I did write an article at the very beginning.

The one thread going through all my books is that the research has been great fun, whether it was Blizzard: Race to The Pole, the book on Arctic exploration, or for the Arsene Wenger book, Wenger: The Making of a Legend.

I was doing a degree in English in Oxford and one of my tutors recommended that I contact one of his friends in journalism, and I started writing for a glossy magazine. It took out a long time to work out how to be a good interviewer. I don’t think I have a novel inside me, if I have one, I haven’t found it yet. I have had great fun doing the books I have done, particularly the horn book, which was read on Radio 4 as book of the week. I was contacted by an actor who had heard it on the radio and who also wrote plays. He was also an ex-horn player, and we got working on the play of the book together, and we have now opened in a small fringe theatre in the West End. It’s selling out very night.

It was deeply strange to watch my story on the stage but very exciting. Having written about the theatre for years, and having had my nose pressed up against the glass, to be allowed into the sweet shop, and to find out from the inside how the thing works, was great.

I do have a new idea for a book, but to use a mixed metaphor I heard a football manager use recently, ‘I have plenty of irons in the fire, but I’m keeping them close to my chest.

I’m trying to finish my fifth novel; I’m expecting a baby in about three months. which is a deadline I can’t ignore. My hormones are making me a bit doolally at the moment.

I started my first novel when I was twenty three or four, and a friend’s mother was throwing out an ancient Mac. As soon as I’d got it After You’d Gone seemd to come, but I didn’t really admit I was writing a novel to anybody.

I see writing novels as an alternative to the life I’m living. There’s not much of me in my writing, I just make it up.

I think I write the kind of novels that I, as a reader, would like to read, so I write to entertain myself first and foremost. I hate the idea of notional reader behind my shoulder, though occasionally there may be a joke or reference that a friend or my husband might get.

My writing is chaotic, I start with a scene of character and let it go from there. I think I would get bored if I had a plan.

I had the idea for Esme Lennox in the mid-nineties. It simmered in my mind. It was the first novel I had written after the birth of my son. I had less time to write, with am hour or so maybe twice a day, while he slept. But I don’t think I could have written Esme without having had a child. The whole thing is about motherhood or thwarted motherhood, about women who transgressed or were trespassed against.. All my research was done in Britain, but every culture of the time was treating women badly. I was always sure the novel was going to be in two parts, the history of Esme and the contemporary story of Iris.

I found it incredibly moving being in Haworth Parsonage [the home of the Brontes where Maggie O’Farrell and I did an event together recently] You can see the table where Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre and the sofa where Emily died. It’s heart breaking. I would never call them lucky, all that illness and death, but they were allowed to exercise their intellect and imagination and this saved them.

My latest book is about twice as long as Esme and it has two stories, one about a woman who has a baby but has no memory of giving birth, and the other about a girl escaping from her controlled upbringing in Devon to 1950s Soho.

I hope to carry on writing; it all depends on whether the voices in my head continue…..

I always enjoyed writing as a child, and as an adult, but never considered it as a proper job. It was a hobby.

I have no idea why so many people liked Chocolate, my third novel, it was deeply unfashionable at the time, being an unashamedly feel good book, a fairy-story, at a time when most writing was minimalist.

It was not difficult writing a new book after Chocolat. I had so many ideas, but i knew I was not writing Chocolat 2.

I feel very privileged to be able to write for a living, but I am lucky in that I liked my former career as a teacher too. I had to wait some time before I wrote Gentlemen and Players, set in a large school. I think I was waiting to get some essential distance on the school and possibly also waiting for some of my former colleagues to die.

I have a lot of diverse influences, my French family scattered all over France and my Yorkshire roots. There has been a lot of positive response to my treatment of these different aspects of my life.

I was lucky that my view of the casting of the film Chocolat pretty well coincided with the view of the film-makers, so finally by some kind of weird synchronicity we ended up with dream casting of Juliette Binoche. When a film is made from your book, you have handed it to others, and you should just enjoy the ride.

I think my fans are pretty well ready to follow me anywhere I go with my writing. They didn’t pressure me into writing a follow up to Chocolat, which is probably why eventually I was able to.

Rune Marks is a book for everybody. I would be reluctant to target it at a teenage market. It is a fantasy novel, and most of my readers are adults.

Reading is an integral part of the writing process. It’s not a question of making time to read, it just feels natural. Though sometimes reading for reviews or competitions feel like homework.

My books often touch on the idea of community and how volatile it can be, on town versus country, on folk lore and fairy-tale, on cooking, and motherhood and children. Some of these threads follow me throughout all my writing.

I’m writing a sequel to Rune Marks, because my daughter liked the book so much, and I’m also writing another novel which is a bit of a mystery to me. I’m discovering the novel as i write it. I’m not always sure how my books are going to end. This present one is a rather dark and chilling psychological thriller. I think if a writer surprises themselves, there’s a chance that the reader will be surprised too.

I was one of those wretched children who wrote all the time; Allan Hollinghurst referred to my ‘facility’ to writing as if I was laying eggs. It feels easy and natural to me. I was trying to become an actor and wrote my first novel The Aerodynamics of Pork to amuse myself. I was working at the time as a singing waiter, where I sang Cole Porter to an almost empty restaurant. My first novel was piece of mischief; I decided to enter for the Betty Trask prize which was for romantic fiction, so I wrote about a lesbian policewoman and a gay teenage boy. I was unaware and unself-conscious about the process. I had energy then which you can never recapture, as self awareness creeps in. I was unguarded and was probably revealing rather a lot about me. They were also trying far too hard to be clever.

I think I said to myself that I was a writer quite quickly; but it was really brought home to me when I started hearing from readers and getting letters from them. It felt odd and yet rather wonderful. It felt that I was really communicating, and it wasn’t a game.

In my later books I’ve dared to get a bit more serious. I think they’re still funny, because humour is my default setting, but I’m confronting serious issues. Rough Music was planned as book to explain my parents’ marriage. The three main characters are me and my parents.

Childhood and siblings and family are in my books a lot. I often think if I had to retrain I would be a psychiatrist. I’m interested in family damage. Equally there has always been spirituality in my books, I had a very religious childhood, and the Church was very much in my family. Being a novelist has something in common with being a priest.

I wrote about Quaker characters in Notes from An Exhibition, and the book apparently prompted about fifty enquiries about how to join the Religious Society of Friends. It was also a book about a difficult mother, who was also brilliantly creative and bi-polar. Being a Richard and Judy choice was responsible for me selling 250, 000 copies of the book. Both Notes from An Exhibition and Rough Music are very popular with reading groups; probably because both have lots of issues to talk about.

I plot all my novels from beginning to end , but I never stick to it, because my characters start developing a life of their own, and tend to sleep with the wrong people.

I’m been published since 1994. I sold my first novel Calendar Girl in 1992. I originally wrote for theatre in New Zealand. I didn’t call myself a writer for ages, as I came from a perfectly ordinary working south London family. I used to talk about myself as someone who wrote books rather than as a writer.

In Calendar Girl I thought I was writing a lesbian love story gone wrong; I was bored with the lesbian stories of the time. I thought I’d write something about real women. I wasn’t intending to write a crime novel.

Crime writing means that you have to think about plot. Far too much literary fiction doesn’t contain plot. I think literary fiction is just another genre, where you can have great characters and great plots, and you can tick all the boxes. Almost nothing of me is in the Saz Martin novels, I am not her, but perhaps there is a tiny bit of me that’s Maggie in Calendar Girl.

Now I love to read crime, and have many crime-writers as my friends; there’s a really nice camaraderie amongst them. And I probably I read about one book in every three written by someone I know. I love Mark Billingham and John Harvey. Ali Smith is the under-rated British lesbian writer in the UK at the moment. I use the term ‘lesbian writer’ as a short hand term, no one pays me to be a lesbian, I am a lesbian who is a also writer. You wouldn’t dream of saying, Ian Rankin, the heterosexual crime writer.

I’ve just sent off a tidied up first draft of my next novel for my agent. It’s my first foray into historical fiction. The main body of the work is done in the rewriting. This novel is set in the Byzantine era; even though it’s in the past I don’t think human beings have fundamentally changed. They still eat, fall in love and have sex.

I don’t get advances of half a million pounds for a novel, but I do make my living from my writing, and I love making new work. Now my process it to ‘make’ a lot of different things at any one time. I’m very fortunate to have this mix in my life.

If you keep going, and you’re strong enough, things do tend to work out.

I’d had things published before, but to get published by Puffin who everybody knows publish great children’s books was great. I’ve been writing professionally for about seven years, and writing for about twenty. I’ve always been happy when things got published, but this is a really big break with a commercial publisher, getting my books all over the world, and it’s a real opportunity to make a living as a professional writer.



I began writing for adult audiences, but when a book of mine came out about Leeds United (If You’re Proud to Be a Leeds Fan - Mainstream), I started working in schools, and it occurred to me that I could write for boys, particularly boys who can be reluctant readers, as I was.

Ian Daley, who has published some of my stories, was giving me feedback on my writing not so long ago, and he said that because of the content and pace of my stories I should think about writing crime. I remember on the train back from Glasshoughton, thinking that I might write about someone solving football crimes. It was an idea that might appeal to both publisher and reader.



I see Foul Play as the beginning of a series, where my second Dead Ball comes out next spring. There could be half a dozen books, or even more, for Danny. I would like to take on different issues in each book. The first book for example is about a football chairman who feels that the club belongs to him and not the fans.

I have another series coming out for Puffin next year called The Football Academy. Each story focuses on a different boy but all the stories interconnect.

I hope that these series will be good for reluctant readers and boys who don’t think they like reading. If I can achieve something in this area it would be very fulfilling.

Of the writers writing for young people now, I love Michael Morpurgo, and Anthony Horowicz, but the best for me. is Andy McNab who writes a boy soldier series; they are stories with good relationships between the characters which I like.

At the moment I’m so focused on finishing these books that I haven’t thought about writing for adults. But I hope to return to writing adult stories at some point.

My advice to would be writers is simple, if you want to get published just keep going. Try and understand the book world, read books like The Writers Handbook, and understand how agents choose books. Talk to other writers and find out how it works. Give yourself a chance by understanding the publishing and book world. The amount of stuff agents take is minimal. I was very lucky, I had a massive piece of luck to get my book deal.

I’ve written for as long as I could read. I didn’t have a feeling that I had to write, I just had a feeling that everybody wrote. I filled rough book after rough book at school, and my English teacher confiscated one and sent it to Ted Hughes, who wrote back to me an encouraging letter to a child poet.

This year will be my twenty fourth year at Glastonbury, always as a performer, never as a punter. I was published pretty early on, and as a punk rocker I produced some beautifully illustrated fanzines, then I started looking for suitable publishers. Eventually one of the bands I was working with, New Model Army, suggested I went to Virgin. Everything I said or suggested for the book they went along with. They didn’t stop me trying to be creative , or try to make me into the stereotypical lady poet. Virgin were happy to let me be a rockstar.

Occasionally the telly ring me up saying they need someone to speak on an issue, whether it’s anti-racism or whatever. Sandi Toksvig had me on her show every week to read one of my poems.

I had always been asked by people who came to my gigs about what had happened to some of the characters in my writing, and I would make up all kinds of answers for them. Eventually I entered some of my writing to New Crime Writer of the Year Competition. It won to my amazement by a unanimous vote. I lied to the publishers and said that I had written the whole thing, and actually wrote it on a tour bus, pounding through Poland. I wanted to write a set of books about women, written in the first person, as companion pieces. You would be so convinced by my central character as a person that you would want to read to the end of the book. I didn’t quite believe it when Billie Morgan was long-listed, and then short-listed for the Orange Prize. I thought when I got the phone call that one of my friends was playing around.

I seem to live in a stage of permanent surprise. Last year I got a letter from Bradford University offering me an honorary D.Litt for services to literature in Bradford and West Yorkshire.

I am now constructing a little shed in my garden, painted forget me not blue, where I’m going to be escaping from a house full of rock stars, who want me to find their socks. It’s going to be where I write.

I was trying to write for Mills and Boone because I thought I wanted to write Mars bars for people, little bits of pleasure for them. They were very encouraging, but when the final reject letter came back from them with the words ‘lacks sparkle’ I thought that I would just accept that as no. I then wrote Living Dangerously, which was my first published novel in 1995. My dear departed mother gave me a writing kit, which was a bit of a ‘put up or shut up’. I thought OK I’m going to start writing this year or never. It’s the only New Year’s resolution I have ever kept.

Perhaps Mills and Boone was perhaps a too small a dress size for me. I needed a larger canvas to write on. I wanted to write about real women whom I would recognize and whom I would want as a friends. I also wanted ordinary women to read my books and think , ‘Oh that could happen to me’.

With Jo in Going Dutch, I suppose I was putting myself in her shoes, and writing something positive about a wife being left for a younger woman. My plan is always to have a woman who is independent, can stand on her own feet, and still have romance too. I do have a particular fondness for my book, Wild Designs which has portraits of my children. But sometimes it’s only when someone writes me a lovely letter that I come round to the novel I have just written.

My new books is about weddings. My central characters are a wedding planner, a dressmaker and a hairdresser. Everyone has amazing stories about weddings.

But I’m currently running a novel about a woman who is running a literary festival. I’m having great fun writing it.

The Island of Lost Souls has its roots a long way back.  I was in my twenties when the Falklands War was happening and I was a typical lefty pacifist, and I think the idea of an anti-war novel was rooted in that time, but I didn’t do anything about it then. The first invasion of Iraq brought my anti-war leanings to the surface.  The thing I was trying to avoid was another Vietnam draft-dodger novel;  I thought the best thing to do was to set it in a near future where conscription was introduced. I think one thing you can do as a writer is to live out some elements in your life that you can’t do in reality.  I wanted to challenge a government’s right to embark on such a war. 

I’ve been doing lots of reader’s groups,  and public readings, around the book, and the war as a topic doesn’t seem to crop up very often.  People seem to be more interested in the dystopia I’ve created rather than the war.  I do base the novel in the Scilly Isles, but the world I’ve created is a hybrid of Britain and America.  The first edition was published in 2006, it feels very long ago now.  When you’re writing something new, the last thing feels far away..  My mind it too occupied by what I’m writing at the moment. I flourished in English at school and wanted to go onto journalism,  I was always writing short stories and the first chapters of novels.  By the end of my twenties I was more interested in writing fiction than journalism. 

My first novel was called Acts of Revision and it was published in 1996.  I  had read my old schools reports and was staggered by the low opinion that teachers seemed to have of me.  I had a hero who was psychologically disturbed ,and, clearing out after his mother’s death, finds his old reports.  He tracks his old teachers down and enacts various revenges against them.  There’s always one teacher in our life that we remember with dislike. 

I’ve more or less wrapped my present novel up. It’s called The Fifth Tenant, set in Kentish Town in London, where a number of people lived in a shared house.  I tell their individual and intersecting stories.   

I don’t make a conscious decision to make each novel different from my others, but I’ve always been easily bored, I’ve always chopped and changed.  I’d find it boring to write genre books like crime or sci-fi.  As a writer you need to go with the grain of your own creative processes. 

The best things in my life as a novelist are that I actually love using words, which why I was attracted to journalism in the first place. Being a writer can be very frustrating, but when you produce a piece of writing you enjoyed writing that’s great. Funnily enough I’ve just started writing poetry again for the first time in about twenty years;  it’s wonderful concentrating on the individual word or image.

I’m talking to Sophie Hannah whose latest collection of poetry Pessimism for Beginners, and latest crime novel Hurting Distance are out now.

‘I’m interested in writing about the psychological side of crime fiction. I write crime novels about people and relationships and the ways that situations can go wrong and can get twisted; things that go wrong because something goes awry in people’s personal lives. I’m not interested in organised crime etc. I prefer to write psychological thrillers of the sort written by Nicci French, and Barbara Vine.

I wanted to blend the police procedural genre [with regular characters that crop up in every book], with a first person, visceral ‘woman in peril’ story. The crime matters in my books because of this first person narration. I always have two story lines in each book, one which concludes at the end of the novel, and the police story which carries on from book to book.

I’ve always been a huge fan of mystery stories, since reading Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven. I find it difficult to read to the end of a book that doesn’t have a mystery in it. My favourite book of last year was The Thirteenth Tale by someone called Diane Setterfield, and another recent favourite was We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver.

I always knew that I wanted to write crime; when I was eighteen I wrote two novels which didn’t get published because they were hopeless. My first crime novel was Little Face which was published in 2006. It’s always very exciting when I start a book, and write a plan. It gets harder and more complicated when I gets going. At the moment I’m writing the fourth, and am at the stage where I’m tying up the loose ends. There’s always a stage at about page 200 when I worry that it might not tie up.

I’m obsessed with titles, Hurting Distance is based on the idea that the people who are closest to you are the people who might do you the most harm. If it’s someone who’s close to you, it’ so much worse. The book is all about betrayal at close range. I had the idea for twist at the end of Hurting Distance before I thought of anything else. I had to work backwards from that.

The crucial thing about my books is the story; I didn’t want people to be distracted from the story by setting it in a real place. I wanted to invent my own place and make it exactly as I wanted it to be. It’s kind of a tribute to Ruth Rendell, my favourite writer of all time, who created her own place. It’s also to get away from cliché’s about the North because I’m based in the North. I wanted to get away from regional connotations.

People are already asking for the next book, which is great, but quite daunting. I’m probably always going to write crime-novels and I’m pretty sure I will be always writing poetry.

My latest novel is called The Point of Rescue, and it’s out now.

My family came from Ireland, and poetry is very important in the culture.  My mother would recite poetry sometimes in English and sometimes in Irish.  It was around a lot.  My head is full of poetry and songs. 

It is much easier and more convenient to write poems more than almost any other art-from.  I could always do it when I felt like it.  You can just get on with poetry.   

I have a strong connectedness to Leeds and Irish culture.  My father was in the Irish Army. One of the things I like about Leeds is that is a place of many communities.  I can also look at other immigrant cultures.  I think my poetry is political;  you can’t be a poet in Leeds without thinking about Tony Harrison who wrote wonderful political things. 

I worked for a long time with homeless people.  In the late eighties I won the National Poetry competition, and that made a book possible. If you write poetry you are drawing out the implications of things more than in prose; in prose you have a little bit of elbow room to develop your ideas. 

When I first came to Leeds I was introduced by Wayne Brown to the poetry of Derek Walcott, who had a massive impact on me.  Heaney, Muldoon and Longley were the Irish writers who influenced me.  I also liked Robert Lowell who had a vast impact on me, particularly his early stuff.  I’ve just been looking at Derek Walcott’s latest book The Prodigal. 

In my latest collection I found many connections between the medieval Le Roman de Fauvel and contemporary issues and this was the basis for The Speed of Dark. 

I make time for writing, and make time regularly, and encourage myself to write as much as I can.  I write things at a certain level, and leave them not completely finished. My head is full of half-finished work.   Things which I know will make some kind of poem, but which just at the moment are not quite complete.

Fundamentally I’m interested in writing about human relationships, about what makes people tick, and the subterranean impulses in peoples’ lives. I’m interested in characters on the fringes, or margins, but specifically my interest has been in history and returning to periods we think we know better than we actually do, like the Victorian period or the Forties.   I access the periods by looking at texts that aren’t in the foreground of people’s minds; for the nineteenth century I turned to pornography for example.  The period is supposed to have been an extraordinarily prim one, but  pornography was big business then.  In the forties, for The Night Watch, I looked at  lot of diaries, like the journals of a young gay man Denton Welch, and a memoir of the period by Barbara Bell called Just Take Your Frock Off; she was policewoman who use her status to pick up girls.  She’d go to gay clubs in uniform, apparently to keep an eye on what was going on, and then return the next night as a customer. 

Wartime must have been very exciting as well as frightening.  You were mixing with people you would never have met in peace-time.  The period became more interesting to me the more research I did for The Night Watch;  I love the films of the time , and it was very nice to turn off my computer and watched films like Brief Encounter in the afternoons as part of my research.  I didn’t intend to write about the war as such, but I soon realised what a fascinating time it was to explore, with so much to examine below the surface. 

I had a crack team of elderly readers who were able to comment on the authenticity and details of the book. I wanted to get the mood of the times, so I read novels like The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen and The Charioteer by Mary Renault, and Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, which showed some of the intensity of wartime relationships. I think of all the characters in the Night Watch, I felt closest to Kay; in any situation I knew what she would say, and  I was sorry to giver her up at the end of the book. 

Four novels in, and on my fifth now, I’ve got to grips with the craft of writing more, though I don’t think you ever feel utterly confident in your writing.  I loved writing as a kid, and wrote pastiches (rather as I do now).  I would like my writing to continue, and have loads of ideas for other books. It’s a pretty nice way to make a living, writing fiction.

Q. You are now three books into the Roy Grace novels, all of them set in Brighton. Are you doing the same for Brighton as Ian Rankin has done for Edinburgh? And is Grace your Rebus?

A. I’m trying to make Brighton the crime capital of England. Seriously though, Brighton Rock by Graham Greene was the book that most impressed me as a kid. I dreamed of writing like that. Roy Grace might well be my Rebus. His work is very much based on my detective friend, Dave Gaylor, a Homicide as well as a pioneering Cold Case specialist, who rose to become Detective Chief Superintendent in Sussex.   But the characterisation is an amalgam of elements, so there is quite a lot of me in him, especially his interest in the paranormal.   And when I created him, I wanted to turn the traditional notion that detectives solve puzzles slightly around, and give Roy Grace a puzzle of his own, his long missing wife Sandy, that he could not solve. It’s the first time I’ve created a character who moves from book to book, and I find out more about Grace each time I write about him.

Q. How did you start writing? And who are your favourite crime writers?

A. I won a Radio 4 short story writing competition when I was seventeen. And then got a job on a television programme. I went on to write spy and supernatural novels, but I always wanted to write crime, I remember loving Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle as a kid, as well as the hard-boiled New York cops in Ed McBain’s books.

Q. I found the ‘buried alive’ chapters of your novel Dead Simple almost unbearably claustrophobic. Did you do any research or was it just gut-churning imagination?

A. It was a combination!   I did get a local funeral director to allow me to lie in a coffin, then had him close the room and leave me there for ten minutes.  It was one of the scariest ten minutes of my life.  I kept thinking what if he had had screwed down the lid and, as in the book, he got killed, and I was stuck in there permanently... !!!  And I had no idea just how little space there is in a coffin.  

When I got pregnant at the same time as two of my friends, that's when I thought 'this is my story'. A former boss once said to be that Barnsley was a joke town, and I thought that if I ever do get around to writing a book, I'm going to set it here and show you the Barnsley I know -  a place with nice countryside up the road,  a place full of wit and warmth and kind people.

I started The Yorkshire Pudding Club in 1998 but abandoned it after a long struggle.  I picked it up again a few days after my 40th birthday in 2004 and decided that I needed to finish writing it.  By that time, I knew I was too far down the road to accept failure and if it didn't get taken on, I'd keep trying until I succeeded.  I was half-way through writing another book when I heard that I’d got a publisher. Of my three main characters in the book, I'm probably closest to Elizabeth - fiercely loyal, soft-hearted, with rubbish taste in men, overly independent and so off the wall, she's not to everyone's tastes.  

Right now I'm very much enjoying the status of 'author', it gives me a great buzz after so many years of coveting it.   It's incredibly mad and exciting. My second book will be out Feb / March 2008 and is called The Birds and the Bees.

If I have any advice for new writers it’s to read loads - but for fun.  Try and write every day; set yourself a minimum of, say a page, but get that done.  Read Stephen King's 'On Writing' which I thought was full of great advice (even though I don't do 'help' books). A book deal doesn’t means instant fortune because  things move so slowly in publishing!  Eighteen months is average from book deal to bookshelf. Don't give up - it took me fifteen years to get here, but it was worth EVERYTHING.