Sarah Hall

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.

One of the things I try to do with my writing is try to evoke the spirit of the place. I think these things imprint on the landscape and the culture.

Daniel Woodrell has made a name as a master of prose with personality - a densely descriptive, gamey form of storytelling, one might say traditional storytelling - of late rather an unfashionable mode.

It's very interesting to me that the nationalist movement in Scotland has become so positive and self-reflective rather than anti-English. The referendum in 2014 was peaceful, for all its deeply and passionately divided people.

I tend to research as I write so that the narrative can take priority, which is important for a piece of fiction, I think, finding out facts as and when I need to.

I don't like novels that tie everything up in a plot-y way. I always think that's not really true of life, particularly of people in power.

It's been noted that writing about the production of art is a masquerade or metaphor for writing about writing. This may be true, there are similarities - both the verbal and the visual represent the thing or the concept.

Revisiting much-loved childhood novels is never easy.

I was the feral, mud-bathing, tree-climbing variety of child. Why would I want to read about pirates when I could build a raft and terrorise sheep along the riverbanks?

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.

Fear is a relative thing; its effects are relative to power.

The beauty of interdisciplinary conversation is that the mode of expression is essentially different for each practitioner, even if ideas are shared.