Helen Dunmore

“For you where never my blood sister so no more shall I call you little sister”

“Mourning Ruby is not a flat landscape: it is more like a box with pictures painted on every face. And each face is also a door which opens, I hope, to take the reader deep into the book.”

“Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.”

“If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us.”

“I can remember being in my pram: children stayed in their prams much longer then than they do now. A big bouncy pram with black covers and a hood with metal clips that could trap your fingers. I was looking up at my sister who was sitting on the pram seat, with her back to me.”

“Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children.”

“Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive.”

“I hope that readers will tear through my books because they can't stop themselves - and then, maybe, read them again and find new things there.”

“I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.”

“I concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately.”

“I was always influenced by language.”

“The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it.”

“To try to expunge an individual's history is a terrible violation.”

“I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place.”