Bath based author Harriet Evans is a Sunday Times Top Ten bestselling author including A Hopeless Romantic, The Love of Her Life, Happily Ever After and The Garden of Lost and Found.
She spent a number of years working in the publishing industry before becoming an author full time.
What are your top 5 writing essentials?
Earplugs! Earplugs are the most important thing for me. People who can bash out thousands of words in cafes with noise around them baffle me. I have a brain like a day-old chick and am so easily distracted I have to be in sensory deprivation to be able to write.
Comfortable set-up – I have bad RSI and so need a separate keyboard, a wrist rest, and a screen raised up a level, as well as a proper office chair. But too often I ignore all that and end up writing in bed especially if it’s cold.
A blank wall – either at the library or in my office at home. I can’t look out of the window otherwise I just stare at people walking past chewing my pencil and making up stories about them instead. At home my wall has props to help me with the book I’m writing at that moment stuck up on a magnetic board – family trees, photos, timelines, pieces of research, paintings, whatever works.
Company – if I don’t arrange to meet up with people I go mad. Writing is lonesome. Your mind does stupid things if you don’t take it out for an airing fairly often.
Time – I have two small and lovely but time-consuming children. They keep turning up at home demanding food and attention. There’s never enough time.
Who or what are your biggest influences in writing?
The writer who’s had the biggest influence over me in terms of her persona and career would be someone like Dorothy L Sayers. She wrote the books she wanted to – big, knarly, intellectually satisfying murder mysteries and as a result they were wildly successful. Then she just went off and translated some Dante and wrote religious poetry plays. She didn’t let anyone put her in a box. I admire that so much. My books aren’t anything like hers, but after two decades of being both an editor in publishing and a writer I know how writers are often labelled to try and make it easier to sell them and often that hurts sales rather than helps.
The person whose books I most admire is Elizabeth Jane Howard. She is hugely underrated; she’s one of the greatest 20th century novelists. Every book is nigh-on perfect.
If any of your books were made into films who would you have cast as the leading actor/s?
My novel A Place for Us would make a great ITV drama I always think. I have cast it all in my head. Judi Dench as Martha the matriarch, Denholm Elliott as her husband (unfortunately he’s been dead for thirty years but he’s perfect for the role so we’ll have to get round that). Julian Barnes making a surprise late-career switch in his acting debut as their eldest son Bill, Suranne Jones as his wife, Miranda Hart as his sister Florence, Olivia Colman twenty years ago as his daughter Lucy and Lily James as Cat, daughter of the mysterious Daisy who never comes home. As you see the cast list needs some time bending to work (but that’s the good thing about fantasy cast lists).
You are a keen supporter of libraries. Why do you think libraries are important?
Libraries should be like doctors and dentists – an essential service, and librarians treated with huge respect. I have been to prisons as part of the Quick Reads scheme and seen the damage done to young people when they’re excluded from the world of books and can’t keep up in a world where everything is online and literacy is so vital.
The closure of libraries, the act of stopping children being able to walk to a local library, is heinous. Alan Bennett said it is a form of child abuse. The way it is slowly, surely, being denied to some children who if they were nudged towards books at the right age might have their lives transformed by reading is something that if I think about it makes me hot and really panicky.
I can’t overstate how wrongheaded it is that local libraries are shutting and that people all too often think those community libraries, not staffed by trained librarians, are an adequate substitute. They are not. Libraries should be properly funded, located locally and stuffed full of initiatives to drive people in. Because when they’re gone people will realise all too late what they’ve lost.
Find out more about Harriet and her books on her website: harriet-evans.com
This interview was conducted in 2020
All image credits: Harriet Evans