I like reading (and writing) poetry at inappropriate moments, folk songs, old books and their smell, mountains, sunsets, the sea, food I’ve never tried before. That certain slant of light – sort of. Walking, diving into ludicrously arcane historical research, swimming in unlikely and preferably forbidden places. Emily Dickinson, Seamus Heaney, T.S Eliot, R.S Thomas, Yeats, Housman, Millay, William Soutar, Edward Thomas, Hopkins, Hardy, the Brontës…(ok, I guess I’ll have to stop sometime.)

When I was about seven I wrote a retelling of the legend of Arachne and Athena, and it felt like the most exciting and satisfying thing I’ve ever done, so then I started writing versions of all my favourite myths. Since then I haven’t been able to stop writing, and still do it compulsively every single day. A few years after the legends I drafted my first novel, and now after some more years and many many re-drafts I’m hoping to get it published. It’s built around the amazing secret story of two forgotten places, and (hopefully) explores our relation to nature and history, the alien and the familiar.

I’m also working on a collection of historical short stories. My story of 18thC Whitby won the Young Walter Scott Prize last year, and over last few weeks I’ve been editing a story about the Wexford Rebellion of 1798 and the legend of the Washer at the Ford, and one set during the last republic of Florence. I plan next to build some stories around my favourite folk songs.

I also have a new novel in progress about a disguised female sailor on board a man-of-war during the Napoleonic era.

Recently my writing has won a moderate handful of prizes (the Young Walter Scott Prize, the Stephen Spender Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the Betjeman Poetry Prize and the Alan Garner Competition 2016 among others.)

“Conventionality is not morality” – Charlotte Brontë