Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Mari Strachan was born into a Welsh family in Harlech, which is located on the north-west coast of Wales, and was brought up there with Welsh as her first language.
After graduating from Cardiff University, she became a qualified chartered librarian, and she worked in a variety of libraries. She has also been a book reviewer, researcher, translator, copywriter and web editor.
In 2007 she acquired an MA (with distinction) in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University.
In addition to writing and reading, Strachan's interests include the history as well as future forms of sustainable living.
She and her husband now live on a tiny smallholding in Ceredigion.
Mari Strachan's website
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We find it inspirational that you are being published for the first time in
your sixties. Has this novel been a long time coming?
No. I've always written, on and off, scraps, short stories, even poems
(terrible ones, I'm no poet!) but never thought anything was worth publishing.
The urge to write is hard to ignore. I decided to focus on it, a now or never
thing, and in 2002 applied for a place on a part-time, on-line creative writing
Masters course with Manchester Metropolitan University. The course was
excellent; the way it studied other novels and made me focus on my own writing
showed me that I had been ignoring my own voice and style and trying to imitate
other writers whose books I admired. That was a revelation to me. The Earth Hums
in B Flat was written as the 'dissertation' element of the course. It began with
an image that had been in my mind for some time (so maybe I should qualify that
adamant 'no' at the beginning) of a skinny child, with wild red hair, balancing
on the seat of a chair with her arms outstretched. Altogether, it took three
years to write (there was a year when I did no writing when my energies were
taken up by family matters). I graduated in 2007 with distinction, and ...
The only completely consistent people are the dead
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