Q&A

What are your favourite books?

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood, All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick, The Love of Stones by Tobias Hill and The Golden Bowl by Henry James

What drives you to be a writer?

I think writers have to write – even if you haven’t got a publisher, most writers are driven to keep writing. I’m quite disciplined though; I try and work set hours as if I have a proper job. Flaubert once said, ‘Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.’

How do you start writing a novel?

I tend to get an idea for a novel, do a bit of plotting and think about the characters, then I get started on the research. I finish inventing my characters and the plot once I know most of the 'facts' and background and then, when the characters are fully formed in my mind I do a chapter breakdown. After that I’m ready to start writing. I aim to do 1,000 words a day.

Do you travel as part of the research for your novels?

I visit the places where my novels are set – so for Angel Bird I went to Northern Ireland; for The Naked Name of Love I travelled to Outer Mongolia and for Sugar Island I visited the real St Simons Island the novel is set on, which is off the coast of Savannah Georgia.

I’ve had some escapades on my travels – when I was writing The Naked Name of Love I lived in a converted potato shed near Cork and once when I was running I got lost! Nothing compared to turning up in Outer Mongolia though with no luggage (it had gone to Russia!). I then got stranded in a town called Moron because the pilot was too drunk to fly the plane. After travelling on horseback across Mongolia, it hurt to sit down for a year!