With my mother at my first book event, long after the age of thirty.
When I was fifteen I bet my mother ten pounds that I’d be published by the age of thirty. Ten pounds was quite a bit to me then. I felt like it was a fair deal, one where she’d have to pay me. After all, I’d always been a writer.
I wrote stories in notepads from as young as seven. I wrote a sequel to my favourite book Heidi when I was ten, with diagrams and chapters and everything. I completed my first teen novel at fourteen. Everything inspired me. My sound of my father’s guitar playing. The smell of my mother’s lap, her yellow dressing gown, as I tried to soothe her tears. The sight of clouds against blue sky.
So I knew my mother would have to hand over ten pounds on my thirtieth birthday.
I continued writing in early adulthood but never quite dared send my work anywhere. Thirty approached. I sent a few articles about being a mum to our local newspaper. When the editor called me, I thought it might just be for feedback, but he wanted me to write a weekly column for them. I was overjoyed.
My first piece was published two months after my thirty-first birthday. I had to smile. Better late then never; because this gave me confidence, and I began having more faith in my writing, and haven’t looked back since.
I remember sitting in my musician father's cross-legged lap while he tried to show me the guitar chords. I was three. His music sheets fascinated me - strange language that translated into music. My mother taught French and English, so her fluency with words fired my interest.
I love all forms of writing. My short stories have won the Glass Woman Prize, the Eric Hoffer Award for Prose, and the Aesthetica Creative Works competition, as well as shortlisting twice for the Bridport Prize and being published in a variety of UK magazines. My first play, Afloat, was performed at Hull Truck Theatre in 2012. I also wrote a ten-year newspaper column for the Hull Daily Mail about being a parent.
My debut novel, How to be Brave, was a Guardian Readers' pick for 2015. My third novel Maria in the Moon was described as ‘quirky, darkly comic and heartfelt’ by the Sunday Mirror; The Lion Tamer Who Lost shortlisted for the Popular Romantic Novel of 2019 at the RNA Awards and longlisted for the Polari Prize 2019; Call Me Star Girl longlisted for the Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize and was Best magazine’s Best Book of the Year 2019; and I Am Dust was a Crime Magazine Monthly Pick. This Is How We Are Human was a Clare Mackintosh Book of the Month. Daffodils, the audiobook of my memoir, and Nothing Else were released 2022. End of Story (as Louise Swanson) and the paperback version of my memoir, Eighteen Seconds, were released in 2023.
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Louise Beech/Louise Swanson 