Ink was probably
always in my blood. My uncle owned the local printing works, and
as a baby in my mother’s arms I used to watch the local newspaper
rolling off the machines. We lived in Felling, a small steep town
with heather hills at the crest and the Tyne far below. I grew up
in a big extended Catholic family: lots of relatives, lots of friends,
lots of stories and songs.
I disliked school and
loved the library. I dreamed that books with my name on the cover
would stand one day on the library shelves. I started to write properly
after university, after five years of teaching. At first, nothing
but short stories that came out in little magazines and on radio.
I gave up teaching, sold
my house, and went to live in an artists’ commune in Norfolk.
I wrote a massive novel that took five years, went to 33 publishers
and was rejected by them all. I went on writing: more stories, more
publications, a few small prizes, the beginning of a new novel.
I came back to Newcastle and worked as a part-time Special Needs
teacher. I ran a fiction magazine, Panurge, that excited and exhausted
me for six years.
Two story collections
were published, Sleepless Nights and A Kind of Heaven. I wrote a
whole sequence of stories, half-real,
half-imaginary
about my childhood in Felling.
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Afterwards, Skellig,
my first children’s novel, came out of the blue, as if it
had been waiting a long time to be told. By the time it was published,
I’d written my second children’s novel, Kit’s
Wilderness. These books are filled with the landscape and spirit
of my own childhood. In writing them, and in writing for children,
I’ve discovered a huge amount about the imagination and the
elemental power of storytelling. I feel that I’ve ‘come
home’ as a writer.
I live in Newcastle with
my partner Sara Jane and our daughter, Freya Grace, quite close
to where I was born I now write full-time. I write not only for
my readers, but for the people I grew up with, my friends and family,
some of whom are gone, but who live inside me still. |
Extracts
taken from AuthorZone Issue 1 magazine.
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