Award-winning novelist Fiona Mountain 

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’I’ve always been equally inspired by books and by music, beginning with
Wuthering Heights - the book and the song. I was undecided about whether I wanted to write beautiful stories like Emily Bronte or haunting songs like Kate Bush! But since, sadly, I can’t sing, I started writing.

In a way, I wanted to be a writer before I could even write. My mother liked to tell a story about how, aged about three, I’d scribble lines of squiggles on a piece of paper, hand it to her, and ask her to read it aloud, and then get upset when the story she valiantly made up, didn’t match the one I thought I was telling.

My love of writing stems from a love of reading. Opening the cover of a storybook is like opening a magical gateway and escaping to another world. 

I’m fascinated by family secrets, old letters, old photographs, old books and old buildings, which are like portals to the past.  The stories I like to write, even if they are set in the present, are inspired by the past - a fascinating but forgotten character or event overlooked by the history books, atmospheric old houses and unsolved mysteries.’