Helen Dunmore

If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us.

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.

Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.

I can remember being in my pram: children stayed in their prams much longer then than they do now. A big bouncy pram with black covers and a hood with metal clips that could trap your fingers. I was looking up at my sister who was sitting on the pram seat, with her back to me.

The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it.

I could start with Mandelstam, who was a huge influence on my early writing.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

Children will not pretend to be enjoying books, and they will not read books because they have been told that these books are good. They are looking for delight.

I concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately.

Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children.

Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive.

As individuals, we are shaped by story from the time of birth; we are formed by what we are told by our parents, our teachers, our intimates.