My story is the story of many postwar British families. Upward mobility. A council house and then new affluence.
From Sarah Waters
My parents were the first in our family to go to grammar school. My grandparents were in service.
My nan was a nursery maid. Most people weren't in big houses. They were maids of all work.
Sometimes I think I'd be perfectly happy to go on rewriting 'Tipping the Velvet' forever because it was so much fun.
The early '20s were like the waist of an hourglass. Lots of things were hurtling toward it and squeezing through it and then hurtling out the other side.
Ours is a world which feels so unsettled and dangerous in large ways, whether it's terrorism or global financial meltdown or climate change - huge things that affect us deeply, and yet things about which we can do, individually, very little.
I'm interested in stories that aren't getting told: it's where my interests lie.
I used to write at home, but it didn't ever occur to me to be a writer.
I do love the past but wouldn't want to live in it.
People say, 'You're like Dickens', but I'm not like Dickens. Zadie Smith is a Dickensian writer because she's writing about society now, just as Dickens was writing about his society.
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