Were there any formative experiences in your childhood that led you towards a literary career? 

There were no books inside my home when I was growing up, except very occasionally when somebody would pick up a children’s book at a jumble sale. But I belonged to the children’s library and read voraciously. Round about the age of ten or eleven I started writing, so I suppose I must have joined the dots and realized that all these books were being written by real people and that I could be one of them. When I told my Gran, who brought me up, that I was going to be a writer she said, “Good, but there’s no money in it.” So then I thought I would get a job in the clothing factory across the road and write in the evenings.

When studying history at university, was there a particular historical period you studied that inspired your writing? 

I was reading International History, where the focus was on diplomacy and international law. But my interest in the First World War had already been formed by seeing my Grandad’s bayonet wound and, later, by encountering the poetry of Owen and Sassoon in school.

You have talked before about your struggle to get published in the beginning until you approached feminist publishing agency, Virago. Do you have any advice for authors who may be experiencing the same struggle? 

Starting out, I had no contacts with the publishing scene so it was a question of sending out copies and getting letters of rejection back, some encouraging, some not. I was eventually published when Angela Carter who’d read some of my work at Lumb Bank where I went on an Arvon course, showed Union Street, my first novel, to Carmen Callil at Virago, so, in the end, it was very much a matter of personal contact.

My advice would be: Get yourself out there, particularly if you live at a distance from London. It’s not easy, but there are opportunities. In my region, the North East of England, New Writing North provides valuable opportunities for writers to attend courses and events where they can meet publishing professionals and fellow writers, but you will find some openings for contact wherever you live. It always helps to be a face and a voice rather than just a typed name.

What does a typical working day look like? Where do you usually write and how do you structure your writing time? 

I try to write as soon as I’ve got myself together in the mornings, which is generally after two coffees, and I aim to keep going for three or four hours. What can throw me completely off course is looking at the news headlines first, so I try to avoid that, though I don’t always succeed.

You’ve been a passionate advocate for giving a voice to the silenced women in history and myths. Why do you think this is so important, and in what ways can hearing such voices benefit us? 

It’s important to hear the voices of ignored and silenced women because without them our understanding of human experience can only ever be fragmentary. Though having said that the experiences of ignored and silenced men are equally important. The silence surrounding what happens to men in armed conflict is very much a recurring theme in my work as present in The Silence of the Girls as in Regeneration.

Your novels focus on the power of voices. How do you think your own voice as an author has changed over time? 

The voices of my characters have certainly changed dramatically over the years, from the Teesside accents of the women in Union Street through the Received Pronunciation of the army officers in Regeneration to the much more flexible, contemporary speech of the mythic bronze-age characters in The Silence of the Girls. I’m not sure my own voice has changed much, but then I’m not sure I know what a writer’s voice consists of. Recurring themes and conflicts? The moral values at stake? The more I think about “voice” the less I understand it.

Do you write with a particular audience in mind? 

I don’t have a particular audience in mind when I’m writing. For me, thinking about “the reader” doesn’t really start until the editing stage, and even then, “the reader” doesn’t have any particular characteristics.

What’s on your bookshelf at the moment? 

The Madness: A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD by Fergal Keane. A warm, compassionate and perceptive look back over a life lived dangerously close to the edge.