Katharine McMahon Born in north-west London, Katharine McMahon studied English and Drama at Bristol University because she wanted either to act or to write. In the end, she taught herself to touch-type on a 21st birthday-present, a portable type-writer and wrote her first novel in a gap year following university. She then qualified as a teacher of English and Drama, and spent a couple of years teaching in a Hertfordshire comprehensive school. But in some ways teaching and writing don’t go together at all because they require the same creative energy, so she gave up teaching, took up a job taking breakdown calls at the RAC and wrote another book. And thus began a cycle of part-time work, bringing up children and writing books, (the latter with varying degrees of success). In some ways being a writer demands a split personality — Katharine loves the quiet of a day’s writing, but then craves company, and being part of a community. In her time she’s run a volunteer bureau, taught writing skills with the Royal Literary Fund in the universities of Hertfordshire and Warwick, trained as a magistrate, and in turn written training courses for magistrates. Even though she writes historical fiction, much of her writing is based on first hand experience: Confinement , for example, is a novel about life in a Victorian School and its modern counterpart; her knowledge of family life, of friendship, of working on committees and in court, all seep in to her understanding of how relationships work. She is somewhat surprised to find herself defined as an historical novelist. What fascinates her most is the play of the past on the present, and on the role of women in society. She loves to create characters who develop a life of their own — and is therefore very bad at planning novels. In the end what happens is often as much a surprise to her as to the reader. |
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