Helen Arden

I was born in 1978 in a house that is no longer there, on a stretch of the Solway coast that loses about a metre of itself a year. My family were not writers. My grandfather kept horses and my mother taught primary school and grew things in a lean-to she built herself out of a library book and my uncle’s second-best tools. Both of those facts have turned up in books since, wearing different coats.

I read Geology at Aberdeen because I liked the maps, and spent eleven years working on ground investigations — logging boreholes, writing factual reports, standing in fields in February with a clipboard while somebody drilled. It is not a literary apprenticeship anybody would design. It taught me two things I have never got out of my prose: that the interesting failure is the slow one, and that the most frightening sentence in the English language is a perfectly neutral description of what is about to happen.

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On the books

Ostler came out in 2009 and sold about eleven hundred copies, and I have never been happier about anything. Small Hours is eleven stories written mostly on night shifts. The Glasshouse Winter took four years and two abandoned drafts. Nine Days of Rain is the one people write to me about.

The Weathering is out in September. It is the book I have been circling since I was nine years old and standing on a bridge being told something true by my brother, and I do not expect to write another one like it.

Elsewhere

I review occasionally, teach one week a year at Moniack Mhor, and answer letters slowly. I do not do panels about whether the novel is dead.