Did you always know you wanted to be a writer? Yes, I did – although it took me a long time to really get going! I always had my nose in a book as a child, and I studied English at university. I started trying to write in the 1980s, when I was in my twenties. The thing I hadn’t thought of was that you need to have lived a bit before you can understand your fellow human beings – which is where most books begin! I took myself terribly seriously and was a horrible failure. After a while I gave up and tried to follow a proper career, but my heart was never quite in it. I started writing seriously again in my forties, after a severe bout of glandular fever left me with M.E. for several years. I suppose I realised that it was now or never, and I had nothing to lose. This time I didn’t tell anyone until I had my first short story published. Just in case.
Can you tell us a little bit about your latest book We That Are Left and when it’s likely to be published?
We That Are Left is set in Cornwall, Anglesey and France during The First World War. It was finished with the help of a three-month Literature Wales Writers’ Bursary, and will be published by Honno Press on January 13th 2014. It tells the story of women during wartime, both those who kept the country going at home and those working on the front line, and the ways in which their lives were changed forever. Elin, the heroine, uses her passion for baking to make the most of the produce from her kitchen garden, so the book also includes genuine recipes from WW1.
Elin lives a luxurious but lonely life at Hiram Hall. Her husband Hugo loves her but never recovered from the Boer War. Now another war threatens to destroy everything she knows. With Hugo at the front, and her cousin Alice and friend Mouse working for the war effort, Elin has to learn to run the estate in Cornwall, making new friends - and enemies. But when Mouse is in danger, Elin must face up to the horrors in France herself. And when the Great War is finally over, Elin's battles prove to have only just begun.
