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" 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. "

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

" Dystopian novels, such as Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' often tend to site their despotised or deformed civilisations in urban environments. "

" 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. "

" There was a lot of fiction I did not enjoy, whose landscapes seemed bland and unevocative, the characters faint-hearted within them, the very words lacking vibrancy. "

" For every prescriptive idea about the craft of fiction, there's at least one writer who makes a virtue of the contrary. "

" Over the years, I've lived in a variety of places, including America, but I was born and raised in the Lake District, in Cumbria. Growing up in that rural, sodden, mountainous county has shaped my brain, perhaps even my temperament. "

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

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

" 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 was a terrible painter - my portraits looked like the evil chimera love-children of Picasso's demoiselles and the BBC test card clown. "

" I studied the short story as part of my creative writing course at university but then set off as a novelist. Generally, there is a sense that even if you want to write short stories, you need to do a novel first. "

" 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. "

" I was useless at science. I was never going to be an astrophysicist. "

" When you are a kid, a wolf is an amazing sight, so sumptuous. I sort of knew these were splendid creatures, that I was not going to find them outside roaming around. It was like a dog, but not a dog. It was incredible, a god! "

" 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. "

" Various books revolutionised what I think about novels and showed me that they're not strict, formulaic things. 'Coming Through Slaughter' by Michael Ondaatje was one of them. "

" I wander around the house and write in bed, at the kitchen table, by the window, in the yard. "

" We all have our preferences - some people go for birds - but for me, there's just something about the wolf; the design of it is really aesthetically pleasing. "

" Quite a lot is required of writers these days in terms of, if not promoting the work, then being a representative of the work. It's a difficult thing, really. "

" I like extreme situations: people pushed out of their comfort zones; the civil veneer stripped off. "

" Swimming in the U.K. is not really about enjoying a sultry experience. It's about cold, clear acts of purification, and constitutional durability. It's about invigoration and bravado. "

" 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 Cumbria where I saw all these fierce agricultural women. "

" There's nothing like the vast, dark Atlantic to remind you of your mortality. But terror can also be exhilarating. "

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

" I've always been interested in wolves, since I was a child. There was a wolf enclosure in a wildlife park very close to where I was brought up; they were the main attraction. "

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

" I married an American. He was from the Pacific Northwest but went to law school in the South, so I was living in Virginia and North Carolina. "

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

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