Describe the place where you write.

I write in libraries.  I love them: they’ve got everything I need.  I would be totally lost without libraries.

Heart-breakingly, my favourite library is about to be shut down.  It’s the saddest thing in the world when something you love stops existing.

I wanted to put a nice picture of it here, but this is the only one I’ve got, taken a few years ago.  It’s strange; it looks so ghostly, as if it’s already dissolving away.  Maybe the camera knew what was going to happen?

What times of the day do you work?

There isn’t a set time.  Usually I give myself a goal for the day – say, writing 1,000 words, or editing a couple of chapters – and when it’s done, I’m free.

What distracts you?

Everything.  It’s so much easier to be distracted than it is to concentrate – and that’s why I love libraries, because there are no distractions there!

But my favourite distraction, as I’ve mentioned before, is photography.  I’ve just started using a wooden box camera from the 1930s, and I can’t stop making pictures like this:

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I wish I had some good sailing stories to tell you, but I don’t.  I can tell you a story about the sea, though.

The sea is my favourite place to go when I want to relax.  I don’t mind where in the world it is, or what the weather’s like – there is something about the sea that always makes me happy.

I can spend hours, days, weeks, just standing by the shore, watching the waves come and go, listening to them break upon the land. Read the rest of this entry »

When I finished writing The Outlaw Varjak Paw, I knew very little about my next book.  I was sure of only two things.  First, it would not be a Varjak Paw book; I wanted to do something completely different.  Second, I had an idea for a story about someone who goes on an epic journey to the end of the world.  But I had no idea who this person would be, or what it would feel like to do such a thing.

While writing my books, I’d also been working as a film journalist.  My favourite film of all time is Atanarjuat The Fast Runner.  That incredible image above is a still from it, and believe me, the film is even better than the still!  It was made in 2001 in the Canadian Arctic by Inuit film-makers, based on oral legends thousands of years of old, and it completely blew me away.  I got to know the makers when I interviewed them, and they kindly invited me to visit them the next time they made a film.

So in 2005, just after finishing Outlaw, I went up to the Arctic.  Specifically to a place called Igloolik, on the edge of the frozen sea, in the Baffin Island region of Canada.  That’s where they live, and I stayed with them while they shot their second film, The Journals Of Knud Rasmussen.

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Photography is my favourite hobby.  I love it because it doesn’t involve words.  When you spend every day writing words, it’s nice to get away from them sometimes!  And pictures can still tell a story.  Photography has helped me see so many strange and interesting things; things I would never have noticed otherwise.

I enjoy prowling around city streets at night with my camera, trying to see things from different points of view.  Sometimes I imagine them from a street cat’s point of view, as if I was Varjak Paw, or one of his friends.  What would the city really look like to them? Read the rest of this entry »