CATCHING UP ON TIME

When I was a child I never said "When I grow up I want to be a writer."
I studied music, worked on music and arts programmes in the BBC, and became a Mum. I was thirty eight when my first book was published, and it took a further ten years before it began to dawn on me that I was turning into a writer  - I mean a writer who could earn a living from writing, and could describe myself on my passport as "a writer."  I suddenly moved into a kind of fifth gear, and felt as though at last, I had found what I really wanted to do, and my writing increased in output and intensity, as if I was making up for all those years when I had always felt I hadn't quite fulfilled myself. "Coram Boy" was a culmination of the previous decade; it won the Whitbread Children's Book of the Year in 2000,  was subsequently adapted for the stage and had two successful runs at the National Theatre in London, then transferred to Broadway in New York.  It has been the most incredible few years of my life - only to be matched by having my children, which I found equally thrilling!

In a way, Coram Boy became a watershed. Can I follow that? What happens now? Not only was it a watershed for me, but the whole nature of publishing is changing fast; the world in which I started my first book is very very different.  My next book, The Blood Stone, was an important step, but, as with every book I've written, it trod new ground, and I tried new ways of writing. Now I have just finished writing "The Robber Baron's Daughter;"  (It may not be that title - though that is the title I've always wanted it to have - )  a book about about a contemporary issue set in the present day. It will be published next year both here and in America.