A: When I first learned to read. My family were miners, farmers, shop and car manufacture workers, and our house was full of books. Everybody read, constantly. I wanted to create that kind of magic where you can enter a different world, be someone else for a while, and be moved by new or familiar experiences.

Q: Of all the types of writing you have completed, which one was your favorite and why?

A: It's usually the work I've just completed. But my favourite form is poetry, and the poem I'm most proud of was written at the request of my second son for his marriage service: With These Rings. I later translated it into Scots: Wi Thur Twa Rings. It was the hardest poem to write, harder still to read at the service, but it works for any couple.

Q: What writers influenced your works?

A: Every one I've ever read - we never stop learning. Shakespeare was formative for the power of his language and the King James Bible for its language and stories. But main influences are writers like D.H. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, Somerset Maugham, Guy de Maupassant, Chekov, Pasternak, Hemmingway, Flannery O'Conner, John Steinbeck.

Q: Any budding writers in the family?

A: My sons are all creative, musicians, an actor, though half of them chose to pursue the sciences. They knew first-hand that a writer's life was hard and impoverished, that awards and international travel are brief respites in a literary career. My youngest published a story or two in literary magazines but, having not long graduated, is too busy living to write at the moment - he's 25. Maybe in future.

Q: From your website, I know you were a part of the Bread & Circuses- could you tell us a little bit about what that is?

A: Bread & Circuses were a group of emerging writers from Glasgow who asked me to do an introductory reading tour with them. I wanted to make it more visually exciting than the usual string-of-beads readings so we added theatrical aids, like lights and movement, with all of us on stage, interspersing short readings with longer pieces so that everybody's work complimented or counterpointed the others. It worked so well we then wrote on specific themes and included dramatic storylines which unfolded in poems, sketches and monologues throughout the individual material. That led to shows which were thematic plays with poems occurring like soliloquies. By then we had reached our performance limits, since we were writers not actors, and moved on. But we had created an exciting new form of poetry theatre which showed author readings could be dramatic and lively.

Q: Do you have any more novels in the works?

A: My next novel, Warrior Daughter, will be out in June 2009, from Viking Penguin. It's an Iron Age story based on a Scottish warrior queen and, I hope, the first of three about her. With historical fiction I'm trying to recover some of our past women heroes so that we can know who we really were and are. But I'm also only drawn to characters whose stories have thematic relevance to contemporary society, from whom we can learn about ourselves.

Q: Who would you consider your role model?

A: My mother. She left my father during a time when divorce was near impossible and fathers would automatically be given custody. So she didn't seek divorce but raised me and my two sisters in her own father's house, and did sewing for neighbours to support us, helped by her brothers who hunted and fished, and the little money my father could send. There were no single parents in our village, despite it being post-war, and we were encouraged to stay in education and choose careers not marriage as a personal goal. She had such spirit and strength.

Q: What do you believe has been your greatest achievement thus far?

A: Raising my own six sons single-handed from the ages of 1-13, as a poet, literary short-story writer and playwright, despite no financial assistance from their dangerously violent father. I am so proud of all of them, such fine men.

Interview Date: August 2008
Profile and questions compiled by Sally W., Beatties Ford Road Branch Library