- From the age of six, like Lyra in Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights, I was brought up inside Queen’s College, Oxford because my father, the historian and academic Robert Blake became the Provost. My first feeling on moving there was of extreme disappointed because there were no climbable trees. It was an odd childhood. You don’t come across many young children in Oxford colleges.
- My favourite twitter accounts are those that tweet Medieval marginalia. I can’t get enough of the stuff! I imagine the scribes going out and having a few too many at lunch time, coming back and thinking, ‘Now then, how about rabbits hunting humans with bows and arrows. Yes, that’ll do.’
- I almost always write first drafts by hand. It’s about feeling the connection between hand and heart.
- I find it very difficult to work in libraries. The last time I did, I felt as if I was surrounded by a clan of emphysemic badgers. I’m much happier in a Caffe Nero with babies crawling over my feet, mothers gossiping, coffee being ground and the music blaring.
- I’ve got a really bad 85% Green and Black Organic Dark Chocolate habit. Really bad.
- When I met my partner Maureen I uttered the immortal words “The writing comes before everything else.” She just burst out laughing. I’m very lucky it didn’t put her off! In a few weeks we will have been together for 18 years.
- As a child my bedroom window looked out onto the Queen’s library which had a stone eagle on top of it. One day it was struck by lightning, shattered and fell down into our garden. I sobbed and sobbed. I’m still not quite sure why but I had projected a great deal of emotion onto that big stone bird. Another one was carved and hoisted aloft but I never felt the same way about it. I’ve got a piece of the broken one on my desk now.
- I’ve lived in London for thirty years and I am passionate about the city. I never tire of the view from Hungerford Bridge towards St Paul’s, especially at night when the National Theatre is lit up with bright colours. I find it incredibly romantic.
- I work one day a week in a charity bookshop. It’s my job to cull the fiction section. Some of the books go off to our £1 sale and the others are pulped and used in road fill. For a woman who writes fiction and never knowingly gets rid of a book it’s sobering. Don’t tell anyone but I tend to ‘save’ the books of authors I know.
- The trigger for writing Titian’s Boatman was my love of Titian’s painting The Man with the Blue Sleeve. He’s such a sexy, sardonic rogue. What’s not to like about that beautiful, silk sleeve and those finely plucked eyebrows? He’s in Room 2 of The National Gallery in London. Go see him and see what he has to say to you.
Victoria Blake