1.   You have worked for FilmFour and the BBC as an editor and also a scriptwriter.  Was it difficult changing genre and writing a book rather than working on something to be seen on screen?

I love the collaborative nature of screen work, where all the individual talents can come together to bring a script to life.  When it works well, it's thrilling, because a team can add so much new insight and imagination to an idea.  In this way a film script is a bit like a recipe, with many cooks interpreting it.  Of course, with many cooks, there are more chances for it to go wrong too, and the intricacies of financing, production and distribution mean the whole process is open to much more compromise, which can lead to disappointment.  Writing novels feels a lot purer in form.  There are no real constraints to what you can and can't write about - and although it's an exhausting thing to achieve, finding your own limits and writing as close to them as you can is absolutely intoxicating. There's nothing like it.

2.   Salt is a story of three generations of a family, and starts in  the Second World War. Did you find it difficult sustaining the different time frames?

Yes.  I'm very attracted to stories where the reader can see characters age within the book, and where the effects of a changing environment refract through them.  I like writing about the different texture of the decades, too, even in a place like North Norfolk where time seems timeless.  But using different timeframes can get complicated, and book writing does seem easier than book keeping when it comes to ages, details and accuracy of setting.  Luckily, Penguin have marvellous copy-editors who can point out when a sixteen year old is in fact seventeen, or when a character has long hair when four pages earlier you just had it cut.

3.  The Norfolk landscape, particularly the weather are central to  the book. How well do you know Norfolk and how much do you think our environment shapes us as characters?

I grew up on the North Norfolk coast and still return there often.  It's an incredible edge to the country, full of the sea's character and force and a lot of it doesn't make sense: why, for example, doesn't the sea just overrun it, when it's only held back by flat mud and sand?  Well, it often does, and in the writing of Salt I wanted to convey this uneasy frontier where the tides ebb and flow and salt gets everywhere - even the Bakewell Tart in the local cafes tastes salty!  I wanted the stories to come and go in a tidal way.  The salt gets in character too, preserving some aspects, destroying others.  Writing about this coastline was not really the issue - it was more a case of how can you not write about it.

4. Which writers do you admire and have any influenced your work?

Writers I admire is very much a moveable feast for me.  It's always a difficult question to answer and feels a disservice to the writers I haven't discovered yet.  Most writers affect you, and you can trace their influence in your own writing like the people you've known.  The last book I read was Moby Dick, which I first read twenty years ago - and still has a photograph of my brother and I standing next to a washed up Sperm Whale as its bookmark.  I read a lot of American writing, and often become interested in writing from particular countries.  Currently I'm reading a lot of Canadian books.  I like to be in awe when I read - WG Sebald is a writer I'm in awe of.

5.  Storytelling is central to your book- the narrator Pip has to unravel what is fact and what is fiction. Was your childhood a  storytelling one?

I can't remember a time when I didn't love stories, both listening to them and telling them.  And I've always been fascinated how memory and retelling stories changes them over time.  I think they have a life of their own, and it's interesting to watch them bend in particular ways over the years.  Making up stories with my children is the loveliest time of all.

6.  What are you working on now? Is it set in a similar landscape?

I've just completed my second novel for Penguin, and am currently editing it.  There's certainly an East Anglian root to it, but it's less place specific and the story involves several journeys.  In many ways it's saltier than SALT, as a lot of it takes place on a journey into the North Sea.