Authors Electric

Back in the late sixties, I lived on a hillside on the Worcestershire border in a cottage without electricity or running water. It was what we now call ‘off the grid’. For two months I never saw a car and the only transportation that passed by was a hot air balloon which one morning flew over the roof. I was there to write. I was very young, and hungry to be published. Seated at a packing-case desk overlooking a damson orchard, I worked on a story involving hot air balloons and sky gypsies. Decorated hot air balloons - not like the one which had flown over me, but ones painted like gypsy caravans or narrow boats. I came up with a sky gypsy called Ben the Balloon Man but, before I could bring him to life, winter was suddenly upon me and I ran out of money and was forced to move and get a job. Fifteen long, non-writing years later, not long after the birth of my fifth child, I read a book called ‘The Flight of Condor I’. It told the story of a balloon flight in Nazca, Peru, by...

This is a true story. It happened twenty years ago. I was on the train home from London having discovered that I’d made the Nestle Children's Book Award shortlist for my first novel, ‘Midnight Blue’. It was a celebratory occasion, as you can imagine, and became even more so when the man sitting opposite fixed me with his eyes and said - completely for no reason that I could see - ‘Excuse me, but are you a writer?’ Well, I’m not in the habit talking to strangers on trains, but who could resist an opener like that? We talked about all sorts of things, though I never did find out why the man thought I was a writer. Bruce Chatwin’s ‘Songlines’ came up, as did Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’. I can’t remember a more enjoyable train journey. At no point did I feel hit on or chatted up. When the man got up to leave, he said, ‘To tell the truth, I’ve had it with modern literature. It’s all either whimsical nostalgia about the past or doom and gloo...