Guest Blogger: Siân Hughes

I grew up in the village of Tilston, south Cheshire. On my way to my boyfriend's house, I used to cycle past a beautiful old house that looked like it was made of six different buildings all joined together. For homework we had to invent a set of characters to put into a building we knew. Even though I had never been inside that house, not even gone down the track towards it, I made up a family and put them inside. Because there were so many different windows, I made up lots of them! Much later in life I was thinking about this set of characters, and how easily they had sprung to life, and I had been imagining lives for them all this time, and I decided to write a book about them. I knew where they lived and who they were, I only needed something to happen to them.

A few years ago, I moved back to Tilston after my mother died, and living there reminded me of all her stories and songs and I missed her terribly. I went back to my invented characters and wrote a story that starts in my home village. I still have never been inside that house! I signed up with Chester University to study for a PhD in Creative Writing, using the novel as my creative text, and studying the medieval poem Pearl alongside it. The poem is about grief, and it comes from Cheshire, so it already seemed very connected to me and to my thoughts about my mother.

I had a wonderful three years at Chester studying with Ian Seed, the prose poet, who helped me stay on task and supported my writing with such insight that when the book was accepted for publication the publishers said, 'This doesn't need much work.' All credit to the Creative Writing teaching at Chester.

I am now working on another novel inspired by another poem from the same medieval manuscript, called Purity or Cleanness. The original poem has a lot of detail about laundry and clothes in it, so my new narrator is a woman who works in a dry cleaner's shop and who notices every detail of people's clothes because she is well trained in it.

Pearl
Longlisted for The Booker Prize 2023

Marianne is eight years old when her mother goes missing.

Left behind with her baby brother and grieving father in a ramshackle house on the edge of a small village, she clings to the fragmented memories of her mother’s love; the smell of fresh herbs, the games they played, and the songs and stories of her childhood.

As time passes, Marianne struggles to adjust, fixated on her mother’s disappearance and the secrets she’s sure her father is keeping from her. Discovering a medieval poem called Pearl and trusting in its promise of consolation, Marianne sets out to make a visual illustration of it, a task that she returns to over and over but somehow never manages to complete.

Tormented by an unmarked gravestone in an abandoned chapel and the tidal pull of the river, her childhood home begins to crumble as the past leads her down a path of self-destruction. But can art heal Marianne? And will her own future as a mother help her find peace?