I'm very aware of modern countryside issues, such as rewilding: how, as science progresses, we begin to understand that a healthy ecosystem is multiform.
— Sarah Hall
You think back and you ask yourself why you became so interested in wolves. I think it was because when I was very small, growing up in a little hamlet near Shap, we would go to Lowther Wildlife Park for birthday parties. Now closed, it was only three miles from my parents' house.
Revisiting much-loved childhood novels is never easy.
Wonderful characters rotate around and through bookshops on a daily basis, competing with and possibly even triumphing over fiction when it comes to entertainment, strangeness and inspiration.
My favourite pool is located in a remote valley in the eastern Lake District, surrounded by vine-hung cliffs and slippery boulders. It has a torrential sheet waterfall at one end and is almost black in colour, so it appears bottomless, a portal to nowhere.
There's nothing like the vast, dark Atlantic to remind you of your mortality. But terror can also be exhilarating.
You always hope you'll surprise somebody with the work. If you write something human and appealing, the perfect reader could be anyone.
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.
Set in a nameless colonial country, in an unspecified era, Katie Kitamura's second novel tracks the fortunes of a landowning family during the first waves of civil unrest.
I was a terrible painter - my portraits looked like the evil chimera love-children of Picasso's demoiselles and the BBC test card clown.
For every prescriptive idea about the craft of fiction, there's at least one writer who makes a virtue of the contrary.
In my early 20s, connecting with fiction was a difficult process. There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to what was meaningful, what convinced, and what made sense.
Writers cannot simply have a go, imagining it's easier to produce a story than a novel because fewer words are required. Have a go by all means; be intrepid, but be equipped.
It's a lovely feeling, just working away at the desk, putting words down, building words up... I think you have to be aware that what you're doing is not just a private act, it's a societal thing.
I think you can tell any human story in a particular place.
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.
I was useless at science. I was never going to be an astrophysicist.
We all have our preferences - some people go for birds - but for me, there's just something about the wolf; the design of it is really aesthetically pleasing.
Nightmares of a capital city overwhelmed by tsunami, war or plague transfix us, but catastrophe is first felt locally, and there are many homes outside the city.
Dystopian novels, such as Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' often tend to site their despotised or deformed civilisations in urban environments.
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?
Swimming in the cold and the dark of British autumn is not for the faint-hearted.
I wander around the house and write in bed, at the kitchen table, by the window, in the yard.
Apex predators are good for an environment in terms of biodiversity and trophic cascade - we have very few. But realistically, only a few areas could sustain free-roaming wolves in Britain, mostly in Scotland.
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.
The beauty of interdisciplinary conversation is that the mode of expression is essentially different for each practitioner, even if ideas are shared.
Art history became an A-level option at my school the year I started sixth form. This happened because another student and I cajoled and bullied the head of the art department into arranging it with the examination board.
Show, don't tell, is a mantra repeated by tutors of creative writing courses the world over. As advice for amateurs, it is sound and helps avoid character profiling, unactivated scenes, and broken narrative frames.
Over the years, I've lived in a variety of places, including America, but I was born and raised in the Lake District, in Cumbria. Growing up in that rural, sodden, mountainous county has shaped my brain, perhaps even my temperament.
Having judged a few competitions, it's clear that novelists are often the laziest short story writers.
Quite a lot is required of writers these days in terms of, if not promoting the work, then being a representative of the work. It's a difficult thing, really.
I've always been interested in the history of radical feminism - what happened to those women of the 1960s and '70s.
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.
You are often asked to explain your work, as if the reader isn't able to work it out. And people always try and label you by your work.
When you are a kid, a wolf is an amazing sight, so sumptuous. I sort of knew these were splendid creatures, that I was not going to find them outside roaming around. It was like a dog, but not a dog. It was incredible, a god!
For its speculations to be taken seriously, dystopian fiction must be part of a discussion of contemporary society, a projection of ongoing political failures perhaps, or the wringing of present jeopardy for future disaster.
When I moved back to Cumbria, one of the first things I did was locate a decent bookshop.
I used to dislike bookshops immensely as a child and was won over only later in life.
Swimming in the U.K. is not really about enjoying a sultry experience. It's about cold, clear acts of purification, and constitutional durability. It's about invigoration and bravado.
Various books revolutionised what I think about novels and showed me that they're not strict, formulaic things. 'Coming Through Slaughter' by Michael Ondaatje was one of them.
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.
Fear is a relative thing; its effects are relative to 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.
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.
There was a lot of fiction I did not enjoy, whose landscapes seemed bland and unevocative, the characters faint-hearted within them, the very words lacking vibrancy.
Short stories are often strong meat. Reading them, even listening to them, can be challenging, by which I do not mean hard work, simply that a certain amount of nerve and maturity is required.
It's taken me 15 years to feel I might be able to write and publish short stories, and for the assiduous checks of the industry to allow some through.
I don't think practitioners should necessarily be advertising their work.
I was brought up in Cumbria where I saw all these fierce agricultural women.
Language description and metaphors seem readily available. The things I have to work harder at are plot, pacing, and form.
