What I had learned of prose technique through the short story gave me the impetus to start writing novels.

In the late 1980s I began to publish short stories, and these were the beginning of a breakthrough into fiction.

I also taught at the University of Glamorgan, the University of Bristol's Continuing Education Department and for the Open College of the Arts. My critical work includes introductions to the poems of Emily Brontë, the short stories of D H Lawrence and F Scott Fitzgerald, a study of Virginia Woolf’s relationships with women and Introductions to the Folio Society's edition of Anna Karenina and to the new Penguin Classics edition of Tolstoy's My Confession.ĭuring the 1980s and early 1990s I taught poetry and creative writing, tutored residential writing courses for the Arvon Foundation and took part in the Poetry Society's Writer in Schools scheme, as well as giving readings and workshops in schools, hospitals, prisons and every other kind of place where a poem could conceivably be welcome. I reviewed poetry for Stand and Poetry Review and later for The Observer, and subsequently reviewed fiction for The Observer, The Times and The Guardian. This experience of working in many different countries and cultures has been very important to my work. I began to travel a great deal within the UK and around the world, for poetry tours and writing residences. I also completed two novels fortunately neither survives, and it was more than ten years before I wrote another novel.ĭuring this time I published several collections of poems, and wrote some of the short stories which were later collected in Love of Fat Men.

I studied English at the University of York, and after graduation taught English as a foreign language in Finland.Īt around this time I began to write the poems which formed my first poetry collection, The Apple Fall, and to publish these in magazines. I began by listening to and learning by heart all kinds of rhymes and hymns and ballads, and then went on to make up my own poems, using the forms I’d heard.

Poetry was very important to me from childhood. You also come to understand very early that stories hold quite different meanings for different listeners, and can be recast from many viewpoints. In a large family you hear a great many stories. My father was the eldest of twelve, and this extended family has no doubt had a strong influence on my life, as have my own children. I was born in December 1952, in Yorkshire, the second of four children.

Birdcage Walk by Helen Dunmore