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"Down Hell`s road" by chairman




Interviews » Collated Answers

Collated Answers from WW interviews

What was your breathrough moment?
Emilia di Girolamo Because I wrote Freaky when my first novel got rejected one time too many, I never felt as if it was 'my book'. I wanted the other novel to be the one being published as I thought it was literary and intellectual while Freaky was commercial and fast paced, a spin on chick-lit. So even when Freaky came out I felt like a bit of a fraud - as if it wasn't really me. Pulp Books are only a small press, though they have a fantastic reputation for publishing exciting work, but I didn't think Freaky would do that well. I was working in a casting agency at the time and they were casting a drama Clerkenwell Films were producing. The producer Murray Fergusson literally picked my book off the casting director's desk and said 'What's this?' She said it was my book and I looked horribly embarrassed from behind my filing! A week later it was optioned. Clerkenwell picked it up and it started to feel like something really big was happening. The book got fantastic reviews and I started to believe that maybe I could write after all!
  
Kit PeelAged 18, walking along a street, looking at two poems I had finished the night before and wondering who had written them.
  
Long Barn BooksWell getting published at 18 with my first novel I suppose, as that meant I had a literary career straight away. Then winning a little clutch of prizes all at once – Whitbread, John Llewelyn Rhys, Somerset Maugham, shortlisted for Booker, which meant I began to be taken seriously by critics. Financially of course, the Woman in Black – not the book, the stage adaptation by Stephen Mallatratt – this has made me financially secure and given me a cracking good pension. I am very very lucky. And it is luck you know.
  
Paul ReedGetting a novel published less than two years after I was sectioned in a psychiatric hospital. I'd been given the diagnosis of schizophrenia and decided I would use it as a springboard rather than let it beat me.
  
Stella DuffyWhen I was fifteen, my old school friend's big brother came to our school with a touring theatre company - he was from my background, his father worked in the timber mill where my Dad worked … and yet he was being an 'artist' for his living. He made me think it might be possible for me to do the same.