Background:

I’m originally from south-west England but have lived abroad for many years. I first came to Alaska in 1991 for three years but, after time away in Bangkok and Minneapolis, moved back in 2004 to teach in the MFA programme. Fairbanks is a place dear to my heart—I met my husband here (Ian Cameron Esslemont—he’s also a writer, mainly of fantasy novels) and have settled back in, this time with a young family.

I have master’s degrees in creative writing from the University of East Anglia (1989) and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (1994), plus a doctorate in literature from the University of Minnesota (2004).

Teaching:

I teach graduate writing courses (Forms of Fiction, Forms of Nonfiction Prose, Writers’ Workshop) plus undergraduate courses including creative writing, academic writing about literature, and women’s literature.

Writing:

My novel Cold Country (Duckworth, 2003) is set en route to and in Fairbanks. I wrote it in the dripping heat of Bangkok where I taught for four years—it was my homage to a place I didn’t think I’d ever be able to return to. It is also my take on the sort of strange friendships that parents force on their children. In the novel, Sandra’s mum and step-dad have not only pushed her into a friendship with a relative called Fleur, they have revived the friendship when it had petered out. Unfortunately for Sandra, this means that she is roped into driving Fleur home from Seattle to Fairbanks and Fleur—supposedly upright and honest—has been less than truthful. She doesn’t have the money to fly Sandra home again, stranding her in a place she hates from the moment she sets foot in it.

My main focus at the moment is on long fiction. In 2006 I finished a novel set in the late Victorian era—my dissertation work at the University of Minnesota looked at depictions of servants in fiction and I wanted to use the wonderful material I'd come across in my research. I’m particularly fascinated by the sensation genre that blossomed in the 1860s (novels such as Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, and Collins’s The Moonstone and The Woman in White), and wanted my novel to have a similar flavour of secrets coming to light and respectable people not being all that they seem—or that they should be. The result is The Dark Lantern (hardback: Crown, 2008; paperback Three Rivers Press, 2009).