Author Interviews

Following a whirlwind romance with a Yorkshire man, Shreya Sen-Handley left a successful career as a TV producer in India, to start a new life in Sheffield. Soon she discovered that life and love was not all that it appeared to be. Her new husband was violent and controlling, and deeply in debt. The chance …

Q. Tell us more about your novel, Dark Chapter It’s about a crime, and the two people who are connected by that crime: the victim and the perpetrator. They are complete strangers, and their lives intersect almost by random during that act of violence. So I explore their individual lives before that event, you see the …

Firstly congratulations on being the most influential woman in Manchester. What does this achievement mean to you and how you would you like to continue the rich cultural heritage that Manchester is so well known for, through your work? Thank you for your warm wishes- much appreciated! To be honest I was  bemused to learn …

Q. Where did the inspiration for Home Fire, and to write a contemporary version of Sophocles Antigone, come from? The inspiration came entirely from Jatinder Verma who runs the Tara Arts theatre in London. He suggested that I might adapt Antigone in a contemporary context as a play. Once I started to think about it though, I realised …

Q. Where did the inspiration for The Stolen Child come from? A friend of a friend wanted to adopt a child. She’d heard of a woman who was being forced to give up her baby because the mother was a drug addict. I thought, what if that child was adopted and went to a lovely …

Vaseem Khan wrote his first novel at seventeen. As a bright young man on the cusp of adulthood he printed out his work, read through it and thought it was amazing. Publishers didn’t agree, and after receiving his first rejection letter, Khan decided to listen to his parents’ advice and went off to university to …

The Things I Would Tell You is a collection of new writing by British Muslim women, edited by writer Sabrina Mahfouz. The project started life more than two years ago and stemmed from Mahfouz’s work with high school girls. “There was nothing to go to, to see the wealth of writing that has come from …

Q. Tell us about your journey into writing crime fiction?  Firstly can I just say thank you so much for this, it’s a big step being featured in TAW. So my writing journey has been an interesting one, I’ve written for years with various levels of success. My true passion though has always been crime. …