Yvvette Edwards

Even after she started on the book, Edwards – Barnet born, Hackney raised and with Montserratian heritage – found it slow going. She honed the characters at writing workshops but then suffered what she calls a ‘false start’ before spending eight months writing, a further year editing, and another long tranche of time being rejected by various publishers, ‘So I did another major edit shifting my chapters around a bit.’ She has subsequently written a second novel, The Mother, and, regardless of progress, feels driven to write ‘in equal measures of torment and rapture’.