An excellent article written by Mark Piggott, author of Fire Horses has been published on The View from Here website. Below is a taster:
"One day last summer someone texted to say they’d just seen my novel in a bookshop. Leaving work early I tubed it to Camden and walked slowly into Waterstones. I’d fantasised about this moment for so many years that I wanted to savour every moment. There it was: “Fire Horses”. Holding it in my hands I closed my eyes in supplication.
It’s tempting now to look back over my life and see everything as part of some inevitable destiny. But until last year, even with a few short stories and poems published, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever have a full-length work of fiction accepted. All I had was an instinct, an excuse: if you fill your life with experience, you might have something to write about.
‘It was exciting, alone with the lightning...’
I wrote this rhyme as a ten-year-old only child, wandering the slopes and streets of what was then a grimy mill town to which mum had fled, leaving Manchester for a tumbledown wreck on the hills. For companionship I wrote poems and jokes, peppering my imagination with imaginary enemies; creating alternative realities to those bleak, Wuthering moors.
When mum re-married we moved to the backside of town and I became one of the park hoodies, drinking cider, taking drugs, fighting for kicks: young people haven’t changed as much in 25 years as the media like to pretend. At the comp where I’d learned to survive by acting stupid my English teacher asked if I’d ever considered writing for a living; I hadn’t, the very idea seemed bizarre. Like a lot of disaffected people I started to like the idea of becoming a writer but I was deemed too disruptive to stay on at school. Having left home that same summer I was sleeping in cellars and on sofas, sharing damp rooms with friends. Unable to find work or sign on I turned more and more to crime and started to get into trouble with the law. Eventually I took to supplementing the pittance I got from a training scheme tending Sylvia Plath’s grave by nefarious means. Fortunately by then I’d met Linda, a local mum who took me in as part of her family. When Linda moved to London she asked if I’d like to come: I didn’t have to think for long. I was 18 and wanted to see 20."... To read the article in full click here! Lucy 
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