Purchase Links
UK - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08JQF4JQT
US - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08JQF4JQT
INVITATION TO AN ONLINE BOOK LAUNCH:
On Saturday 28th November 2020, Alison will be joining four other
authors for a joint event via Zoom called Darkstroke Defined: The five writers
will talk about their new books, read extracts and answer questions. For your
free ticket, go to: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/darkstroke-defined-tickets-125793372363
3. What fantastical fictional world would you
want to live in (if any) given the chance?
I
would love to live in Harry Potter’s world of flying broomsticks and washing-up
spells. It sounds like my kind of place.
4. Did you want to be an author when you grew up?
Yes.
I always wanted to write stories, was always scribbling ideas but didn’t really
know how to get started writing a book. It wasn’t until I was a young mum and
my husband bought me an Amstrad Word Processor – state of the art technology at
the time – that I began to write seriously. It took a lot of years to learn my
craft and by the time I got published I was writing on a laptop.
5. Have you ever met anyone famous?
I’ve
been very lucky to have met some brilliant authors who are famous. Phillip
Pullman and Bernadine Evaristo were both visiting fellows on my MA course at
Oxford Brookes University and Kit de Waal and Annie Murray were fellow students
(and now friends). I’ve also met some great romance writers, such as Katie
Fforde through my membership of The Romantic Novelists’ Association and once
had dinner with Joanne Harris and Charlie Higson at a Society of Authors dinner
in Scotland.
If
you’re asking about more general celebrity types, I had breakfast and a chat
with the lovely Debbie McGee in the departure lounge of a London Airport. I was
heading to Thailand and she was going to join a cruise in Spain.
Even
more obscurely, I used to work for Christian charities and over my career I met
lots of Bishops and a couple of Archbishops – who I suppose are famous in their
own field rather than generally well-known.
6. How long, on
average, does it take you to write a book?
That’s really hard to work out. My first three books were
written when I could find the time over a period of five or six years. My
latest book, MINE, is something I’ve been thinking about and writing
various versions of for about twenty years. It’s based on real events in my
family, so it was important to me to find the best way to tell the story and it
took several attempts to get it right.
Now that my children have left home and I’ve given up my
day job, I can get a first draft of a book written in three to six months.
7. How do you select
the names of your characters?
I think about their personality, type of background and
so on in the first instance. For the characters in MINE, it was a bit
harder because the characters were based on real people but I didn’t want to
use their real names. The main characters, Jack and Lily were fairly easy to
name. Jack because he was a bit of a Jack the Lad kind of person. The real name
of the person Lily is based on was named after a different flower. One of the
hardest things was selecting a name for the character based on me! In the end
one of my cousins suggested Caroline and I liked that. She also put in a
request to be called Patsy because she’s a fan of the singer Patsy Cline. For
the others, I looked at lists of popular baby names around the time they would
have been born and decided what fits.
8. If you were the
last person on Earth, what would you do?
Just thinking about that makes me very sad! Being the
last person on Earth would be horrible – lonely and possibly quite frightening.
I could only hope that artificial intelligence had been developed to such an
extent that I’d have something – a robot, perhaps, to talk to. That
said, I really don’t want to the last person at all.
9. What fictional
character would you want to be friends with in real life?
Ooh, that’s a hard one. I tend to want to be friends with
so many fictional characters – every time I read another book, I find someone
I’d like to be my new best friend. But if pushed for one name today, I’d link
it with my answer about fantastical fictional worlds and say I’d love to have
been friends with Hermione Grainger. She’s smart, kickass and helped save the
world.
10. Do you have any
advice for aspiring writers?
Lots, but I don’t want to sound bossy. So, put simply,
I’d say: Read lots; write as often as you can; learn from others but find your
own unique voice; and, above all, never give up!
11. If you could live in any time period, what would it be
and why?
I’m a bit greedy and would like to be a time traveller so
that I can go to lots of other time periods. I’ve been working on a series of
time-travel books featuring Rosie, a fifteen year old girl who is thrown back
through time to meet her ancestors. So far, she’s been in the London Blitz of
1940 and Whitechapel in the 1888 when Jack the Ripper was about. I have so much
fun writing these stories but I wish I could be Rosie and see and experience it
all for myself.
12. Tell us 10 fun facts about yourself!
1. I swam my first mile when I was nine years old (and it’s
mentioned in MINE).
2. One of the first people to read an early version of MINE
was Bryony Evens, the woman who found Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
in a slush pile and persuaded her agent boss to sign JK Rowling. Sadly, Bryony
no longer works in publishing but she gave me some good advice and a lot of
encouragement, which kept me going.
3. They’re not all mentioned in MINE, but I have A
LOT of cousins – for most of my life I thought I had twenty-six first cousins,
but after a recent Ancestry DNA test, I discovered I had three more – the
secret offspring of a very naughty uncle in the 1960s.
4. I’ve been interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours programme
about the importance of making a Will if you’re a parent.
5. I’ve trekked along the Great Wall of China. There are a
lot of steps!
6. I drink several cups of peppermint tea every day.
7. I once spent a night in the servants’ quarters in Windsor
Castle after a attending a party in the dungeon at the bottom of the Round
Tower.
8. I’m allergic to coffee. This was a bit embarrassing when
I was sent by the charity I worked for to visit coffee growing communities in
Honduras. I had to decline everyone’s offer of a taste of their home-grown
coffee and I felt really bad about that.
9. I once helped build a house in Thailand as a volunteer
with Habitat for Humanity.
10. I can see Glastonbury Tor from my kitchen window.
Author Bio
–
Alison has been a legal executive, a
registered childminder, a professional fund-raiser and a teacher. She has
travelled the world – from spending a year as an exchange student in the US in
the 1970s and trekking the Great Wall of China to celebrate her fortieth year
and lots of other interesting places in between.
In her mid-forties Alison went to university
part-time and gained a first-class degree in Creative Writing at Bath Spa
University and an MA in the same subject from Oxford Brookes University, both
while still working full-time. Her first book was published a year after she
completed her master’s degree.
Mine is a domestic drama set in 1960s
London based on real events in her family. She is the only person who can tell
this particular story. Exploring themes of class, ambition and sexual
politics, Mine shows how ordinary people can make choices that lead
them into extraordinary situations.
Alison teaches creative and life-writing, runs
workshops and retreats with Imagine Creative Writing Workshops(www.imaginecreativewriting.co.uk)
as well as working as a freelance editor. She is a member of the Society of
Authors and the Romantic Novelists’ Association.
She lives in Somerset, within sight of
Glastonbury Tor.
Social
Media Links –
Websites: www.alisonroseknight.com www.imaginecreativewriting.co.uk
www.darkstroke.com/dark-stroke/alison-knight/
Facebook: www.facebook.com/alison.knight.942
Twitter: @Alison_Knight59
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