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Featured Author

Click here to read more about Ross Raisin

This months Featured Author, Ross Raisin, answers questions from The York Library Lesbian Reading Group.

The York Library Lesbian Reading Group have been reading Ross Raisin's God's Own Country.

Q: What made you write about Yorkshire, or North Yorkshire in particular?

A: Well, I am from Yorkshire, so there is that of course, the pride and knowledge that come from being born there – although, come to think of it, I’m not sure how chest-beatingly proud the book is, given that its narrator is pretty scathing towards everything and everybody around him. But, Yorkshire, I think primarily for the landscape to be honest. The idea for the character came before I developed his voice, so in that sense he could really have come from any area, but when I knew he was to be an English farmer there was only one place with the vast, rugged and beautiful countryside that I wanted him to live in.

Q: Where did the character’s voice come from?

A: A lot of time spent brooding and crafting. Initially the book was in the 3rd person and was not in any way idiomatic, but once I decided to make it closer to him, and try a 1st person narrative, it came alive for me much more when I started to give him a dialectal voice. This voice is playful and inventive, and uses much of a real Yorkshire dialect. Once that was working away into the first draft, it gave expression to the ideas and characters that really only came through the voice. And to the landscape as well. I found that there was a real energy between his voice and the landscape he comes from, and it gave me the chance to describe that landscape in a way that a straighter narrative would not be able to.

Q: Can you name other characters in novels whose voices, or personalities, you’ve found striking or enjoyed?

A: There’s a couple: Ned Kelly in The True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey. In a way, this is the sort of style of narrator that I have tried to make myself, with Sam Marsdyke. Ned is uneducated and outcast, but his unbridled imagination feeds into a beautiful song of a voice, which, even though it is poetic and extraordinary, never once seems false. And, more recently, Oliver Tate in Joe Dunthorne’s Submarine. Very funny, and very believable also. Oliver is a strange boy, with many wild and misguided ideas, and I think that the feat of the author is again to be extremely creative but still create somebody real.

Q: How does it feel now that you’re a published writer? What have you enjoyed and/or found difficult about the process?

A: It does feel good and is a real privilege to be published, and I make sure to remind myself of that all the time. I read none of my reviews or press, and certainly never watch or listen to myself on the radio or the TV. For one thing, I think I’d go mental, and for another, I don’t think it would help me with the most important thing, which is to enjoy writing and continue to make work that you are proud of. That is what I am trying to do at the moment. Inevitably, the promotion of the previous book overlaps somewhat with the creation of the next, something that I perhaps should have prepared myself for a bit more, but nonetheless, the opportunity to travel, whether it is to Canada or to Guildford, and meet people such as I have, makes me feel very lucky, and very chuffed.