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After Land I wanted to continue exploring the theme but I needed a new challenge so turned to colour. I explored Bradford and produced a series of urban landscapes that I liked, but because Land had made such an impact on the general public my colour work wasn't reviewed.

Writing about where I was from and the people I knew was not something that would have occurred to me early on, because like so many Southerners of that period - the Sixties - I rejected those things when I went north.

The world that you and I live in is increasingly challenged. Population growth, pollution, over-consumption, unsustainable patterns, social conflict, climate change, loss of nature... these are not good stories.

I wrote my novel 'Bitter Greens' as the creative component of a Doctorate of Creative Arts and am now looking at the history of the Rapunzel tale as my theoretical component.

I have, I must admit, despised the English countryside for much of my life - despised it and avoided it for its want of danger and adventure.

I think Scotland has some great stories.

You can take any one of our stories that we use right now, put western clothes on us, stick us out in the west and they'll work just as well - any single one of them - because they're stories about people, they're stories about things.

My favorite stories are about kids who refuse to give up; their homes and schools may have been destroyed; they've probably had to rely on themselves more than a lot of adults do, and they've resisted the many bad alternatives that city life offers to poor teens.

I have, for many years past, contemplated the noble races of red men who are now spread over these trackless forests and boundless prairies, melting away at the approach of civilization.

I love covering stories that have huge historic impacts.