It took my Christmas-fuddled brain a while to work out the meaning of the lovely letter from the Judging Panel Chair at the Cheshire Literature Prize but my entry was one of the top 25 shortlisted from over 260 entries and, as such, will be published in the Prize Anthology. The winners was Tessa Sheridan - congratulations, Tessa! - whose story lends its name to the anthology title, Zoo. I'm chuffed to have made the shortlist for this prize for those with a connection to Cheshire. I was born and raised there, before leaving to do my degree down South. But I'm a Northerner by nature, and I love to write in a Northern voice when the story suits, a silly example being this nifty flash.

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So, I had all sorts of things I wanted to blog about - why so many of my favourite short story writers are Scottish, for example - and then the nicest email last night and all my priorities shifted. The Scots will have to wait. The Binnacle, the delightful people who awarded me the Grand Prize in their Sixth Annual Ultra Short Comp last year, wrote to let me know that the publication of the Ultra-Short issue has been a little delayed... but then took my mind off this entirely by telling me that they have become my Favourite Lit Mag Ever by nominating my winning story, My Mother Was an Upright Piano, for a Pushcart Prize!..........

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I spent Christmas in Tynemouth, a sleepy seaside town about 10 miles from Newcastle, where I grew up. My parents are moving down South in a couple of months, so this will probably be the last time for a good while I will go there. It feels a bit weird, knowing that potentially I will not go back. I left to go to university, and have lived in London since I was 18, but I still felt I had some connection with the area as my parents lived there, so this all feels a bit final.

One day of the post-Christmas period was spent at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, a converted flour mill on the Gateshead side of the river, the north-east’s answer to Tate Modern.

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No poems, but readings from an older version of the gospels which had the virtue of decorous language that was also clearly understood. A contemporary note was struck when Rev William Gulliford drew parallels between the Christmas story and the plot of a film currently showing in London: 'Where the Wild Things Are'. Both, he said, involved' a malevolent Empire, cynical Kings and dark things lurking'.


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The final interview in this series has a bit of a twist – the featured writer has chosen not to give up the day job. Katharine McMahon is author of The Crimson Rooms (out in paperback in March 2010), a historical who-dunnit about what it was like to be a pioneering woman lawer in 1924. She has also written A Way Through the Woods (recently out in paperback), The Rose of Sebastopol (Shortlisted for the British Book Awards Richard and Judy Best Read of the Year, 2008, and was a Richard & Judy Book Club Selection), The Alchemist’s Daughter, Footsteps and Confinement.

MT: Was not giving up your day job a conscious choice?

MK: It was definitely a conscious choice – both for financial reasons and of sanity. I find that three days at the desk is quite enough per week.

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' The readings seem shorter than usual', said J. We were at at the annual Carol Service at St Pauls on Tuesday. Except it wasn't a Carol Service, it was 'A Celebration of Christmas', and some of the reading were poems.


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Have you ever learnt a dance step, or a musical instrument, or a tennis stroke? Felt how it gradually makes sense, how getting your weight in the right place makes the other arm move sweetly to where it needs to be, over and over again, whether it's a bow or a golf club? How suddenly your dancing body finds its place in the music, so that you're free by virtue of being part of the pattern? Can you imagine now, this minute, riding a bicycle down the road, pedal by pedal, push and turn and swoop? No, not the road beyond the window, that one at your grandmother's: the steep lane with the stony bit all down the middle which was bone-shaking if you strayed onto it, and the sharp bend at the bottom? And how once you didn't take the bend right, but flew off into the gravel and nettles? And got a graze on your chin, of all places, as well as the base of both hands?

One of the more valuable dividends of the Darwin bicentenary, for me, has been encountering the book Sparks of Genius, by Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein.

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