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" I was brought up in Cumbria where I saw all these fierce agricultural women. "

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" Show, don't tell, is a mantra repeated by tutors of creative writing courses the world over. As advice for amateurs, it is sound and helps avoid character profiling, unactivated scenes, and broken narrative frames. "

" I don't see that books can be written without political context - not if they're relevant and ambitious. "

" In my early 20s, connecting with fiction was a difficult process. There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to what was meaningful, what convinced, and what made sense. "

" I've always been interested in the history of radical feminism - what happened to those women of the 1960s and '70s. "

" Having judged a few competitions, it's clear that novelists are often the laziest short story writers. "

" I used to dislike bookshops immensely as a child and was won over only later in life. "

" Wonderful characters rotate around and through bookshops on a daily basis, competing with and possibly even triumphing over fiction when it comes to entertainment, strangeness and inspiration. "

" I am a feminist, although I always worry saying that because you then get people asking you about the 1970s. "

" Apex predators are good for an environment in terms of biodiversity and trophic cascade - we have very few. But realistically, only a few areas could sustain free-roaming wolves in Britain, mostly in Scotland. "

" Swimming in the cold and the dark of British autumn is not for the faint-hearted. "

" Revisiting much-loved childhood novels is never easy. "

" I'm very aware of modern countryside issues, such as rewilding: how, as science progresses, we begin to understand that a healthy ecosystem is multiform. "

" It's a lovely feeling, just working away at the desk, putting words down, building words up... I think you have to be aware that what you're doing is not just a private act, it's a societal thing. "

" Short stories are often strong meat. Reading them, even listening to them, can be challenging, by which I do not mean hard work, simply that a certain amount of nerve and maturity is required. "

" For about two years, while researching 'The Wolf Border,' I was a complete wolf bore. I would regurgitate everything I was researching, whether people were interested or not. "

" Our lives are politically wound. "

" My work is of me; it's not me. I want it to be far more extraordinary than I am. "

" It's taken me 15 years to feel I might be able to write and publish short stories, and for the assiduous checks of the industry to allow some through. "

" You think back and you ask yourself why you became so interested in wolves. I think it was because when I was very small, growing up in a little hamlet near Shap, we would go to Lowther Wildlife Park for birthday parties. Now closed, it was only three miles from my parents' house. "

" When I moved back to Cumbria, one of the first things I did was locate a decent bookshop. "

" Language description and metaphors seem readily available. The things I have to work harder at are plot, pacing, and form. "

" You always hope you'll surprise somebody with the work. If you write something human and appealing, the perfect reader could be anyone. "

" Nightmares of a capital city overwhelmed by tsunami, war or plague transfix us, but catastrophe is first felt locally, and there are many homes outside the city. "

" James Salter has talents on the page we novelists would sell souls to the devil for. "

" Writing, and its theatre of operation, is better than working shifts packing frozen sausages; that's all I need to think about if I'm having difficulties. "

" My favourite pool is located in a remote valley in the eastern Lake District, surrounded by vine-hung cliffs and slippery boulders. It has a torrential sheet waterfall at one end and is almost black in colour, so it appears bottomless, a portal to nowhere. "

" I was brought up in the north of England, which is probably no rougher than anywhere else, but I remember as a child being kind of mesmerized by girls fighting on the playground. "

" The short story is very good at looking at shadow psychologies and how the system breaks down underneath. "

" You can't see all of a place until you look at it from a distance. "

" I write in the mornings or afternoons - I'm not a night owl and can write for only four or five hours maximum. "