Creative Writing

I completed my MA in Creative Writing at the University of Hull in January 2010, and won the inaugural Philip Larkin Prize for the most promising creative writing MA student in 2007. My favourite authors include Lionel Shriver, TC Boyle, Sarah Waters and Kate Atkinson.

I have started work on a novel about childhood and belonging. It starts like this:

Her mother had given her the name Agnes, believing that a good-looking woman was even more striking if her name was a homely one. The irony was never lost on Agnes or her mother that, eighteen years later, the good looks that were to have been her grand prize, her birthright, had not materialised.
Instead Agnes’s looks matched her name. Her face, a pallid pastry pudding lacking definition (‘plain’ was the word people used most commonly.) Her hair, sparse and lacking colour. Her body, ungainly and unfeminine.
So Agnes grew up feeling cursed by a name that lacked glamour, and disappointed by her own changing shape. Too big, too square. The body of a farmer’s wife built for lambing and milking and lugging hay bales when what she’d wanted, what she’d anticipated, was the body of a movie starlet who wore gossamer gowns from Paris and never lifted anything heavier than a cigarette in a holder or a glass of Crystal.
Of course, by the age of 18 and already failing to fit in at university as a shy fresher with the wrong accent, the wrong social background and the wrong ‘look’, Agnes was learning to live with the accruing disappointments which, in her early teens, had threatened to crush her.
‘Agnes is a good homely name,’ her mother tried to reassure her one summer’s day when the subject came up yet again in the form of a bitter complaint from thirteen-year-old Agnes about why she wasn’t given a more elegant name.
‘It’s reliable, solid. Those are good qualities in a girl.’
‘So why does everyone laugh at me?’ asked Agnes, ignoring the cup of hot chocolate her mother had set down in front of her as an attempt at reassurance.
‘They call me Baggy Aggie. They call me Sackless Agnes.’
Her voice trailed off.