A strange thing happened this week: my dreams came true.
When I received a message several weeks ago to say that I had been shortlisted for the Walter Scott prize, the world's richest prize for historical fiction, I was struck by one immediate thought: "I didn't know I wrote historical fiction." My nominated novel The Gallows Pole is the retelling of a true story of a murderous 18th-century criminal gang of forgers known as the Cragg Vale Coiners, who take on the might of an establishment who want to keep them poor and hungry. Up until then, I simply saw it as an allegorical tale for an austerity Britain ruled by a government not entirely favourable towards literature - writing the novel in a library felt like an act of defiance against the closure of 478 libraries between 2010 and 2017 - and particularly keen on squeezing the last gaps of life from some towns across the north of England.
