Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.
My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.
Mourning Ruby is not a flat landscape: it is more like a box with pictures painted on every face. And each face is also a door which opens, I hope, to take the reader deep into the book.
I was always influenced by language.
In a world without air all you breathe is adventure!
We are creatures of story.
A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.
As individuals, we are shaped by story from the time of birth; we are formed by what we are told by our parents, our teachers, our intimates.
However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I’m concerned.
However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.
I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.
Once one habit peels away the others follow it. You have to hold on, or the next thing you’ll find yourself parading down the street in your nightdress. Habit is everything.
I didn’t choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place.
I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.
I concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately.
I can remember being in my pram: children stayed in their prams much longer then than they do now. A big bouncy pram with black covers and a hood with metal clips that could trap your fingers. I was looking up at my sister who was sitting on the pram seat, with her back to me.
The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves – although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was.
When you are young you don’t always realise how full of doubts everybody is.
Writing children’s books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive.
Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.
To try to expunge an individual’s history is a terrible violation.