A small announcement

I wrote my first book when I was about 13. It wasn’t even really a book - it was maybe 50 pages long, and at the end I couldn’t figure out what to do so the universe imploded and all my characters (based on my cousins) died.

Between then and when I turned 16, I wrote some terrible poetry. Standouts include a poem called “Chocolate Goth” and an untitled masterpiece about the fact that “gift” is the German word for “poison” (look, I had to revise for my GCSEs somehow.)

Suffice to say, I’m not an accomplished poet.

Those years were not my favourite ones, honestly. I ran away from home, slept on friends’ bedroom floors and sofas, and eventually got a council flat with a side dose of “oh God, I have NO money.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my mental health took a dive. For unrelated reasons I’m sure, my Gothy tendencies intensified and I got *really into* quasi-religious, spiritualist writings about how Lucifer was misunderstood and also 14th century Italian poems about Hell and the people therein. Well, just one of those, Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, from The Divine Comedy.

At the same time, a little TV show came out on Channel 4 called Skins. Skins was about a group of teenagers and their friendships/relationships with each other, with their parents, with the wide world of Bristol around them. It was controversial, I vaguely remember, because these teenagers took drugs, got pissed at parties, and had sex. In fact, they behaved a little similarly to *my* group of friends.

I realised, through watching Skins and also from reading books like Junk by Melvin Burgess, that it was possible to write about the kind of young people I knew and loved. I could write about the hard things we were going through, and also - because it was a story - I could write about Lucifer and Dante Alighieri’s 14th century vision of Hell, and no-one could stop me.

The problem was, in 2006, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I wrote some stuff and it was high melodrama. I made people read it and they were all lovely about it, but I knew it wasn’t finished. I put it away for a bit and came back to it at university, but I knew there was something off about it. I decided it was too big a topic for someone like me to tackle, and started writing a couple of other things instead.

I came back to the book (then called “Underwood”) off and on for years. Until one day, just before the pandemic began, actually, I woke up one morning with a new opening in my head. And a new title. And it felt *right*. Probably because at the time, I was supposed to be writing a different novel altogether and I am nothing if not a literary magpie. Shiny new thing, caw! Shiny new thing!

I sat down at my PC in the tiny studio flat I shared with my boyfriend, and started writing. And this time, unlike every other time I’d done this since 2006, I finished the book. Various things helped:

• I’m not poor anymore, so I don’t have a running commentary about how selfish and unproductive it is to write when I could be doing an extra shift at work in my head.

• My boyfriend thinks I’m a genius. I’ve never met anyone as supportive about my writing as this man before in my life.

• I did some writing courses, and found a community of writers to swap work around with to get feedback.

• My job was 4 days a week, so I had an extra day in my weekend to write.

• Perhaps most importantly: I’d figured how to write my main character’s voice. She talked me through the whole thing.

Even with all of that going on, I knew logically that getting this book over the finish line was one thing, but getting anyone in the literary world to take it seriously was quite another.

I’ve talked about this before, but I am a massive pessimist about the odds of getting published. It’s not a confidence thing, it’s just that there are SO MANY incredible books written every year, and publishing is a business, and those two facts combined just mean that even if you write the world’s most glorious book, there’s still going to be a big ol’ chunk of luck involved in getting it Out There.

Well, I got lucky.

VERY lucky. Because last week while I was in Iceland I got a phone call to tell me I won the Chairman’s Choice Prize in the Times/Chicken House competition.

The Chairman’s Choice Prize is for a book that the judging panel believe needs a bit more editorial work (totally fair assessment, I must say) but that they’d like to… gosh, I can hardly believe I get to type this… publish.

That’s right: All Hell, the book I’ve been writing since 2006, the book about teenage homelessness and the state of the human soul itself, is getting published. By a real publisher, that has also published books I grew up reading and loving.

It means SO MUCH to me, I can’t even begin to explain it. This book has fragments of my soul embedded in it. I’m obviously intending to write more books, but this one is special. It’s Northern, and silly, and sad, and funny, and there are Angels who talk like Jeeves and Wooster characters and demons who wear Beatles t-shirts and like to ride on the Dodgems.

And it just needed someone to *get it*. To understand what my characters were trying to say. I’m so, so grateful that the judging panel at Chicken House were those someones. And I am so… excited! Shocked! Delighted! It won’t be out for a while, but I’ll keep you posted.