Profiles

A few years ago Joolz Denby was short-listed for the Orange Prize - a top literary award for fiction written by women - for her dark novel Billy Morgan. Like Joolz' earlier novels Billy Morgan is set in Bradford and, also like her other novels, can often be found among the crime shelves. But Borrowed Light is set in Cornwall.

Nevertheless Joolz believes the novel connects closely with her previous work. She says: "It is about a family from Bradford who go to live in Cornwall. My second novel was about a family from Bradford, some of whom had gone to live in Spain, so it's not a huge departure to have a family from this area going to live somewhere else. They are a kind of hippy family and they thought they'd go and live on a beach in Cornwall and have the good life. They did that thing a lot of people do which is to think they can leave their problems behind if they go somewhere else. Unfortunately the mother gets multiple sclerosis and they discover problems tend to go with you."

But Joolz believes this is something closer to home, too: "Sadly we see something of the same thing happening in Bradford now. We see all these beautiful smart flats going up but none of the young people born and bred in Bradford could possibly afford them. People might see it happening in a seaside resort but not in Bradford. But it is happening in Bradford.

"There's a colossal rejuvenation going on in Bradford, and it will continue to go on, and we can see over the next 10 years Bradford will be quite a changed place, but what we have to be very careful about in Bradford, and I'm always stressing, especially when I go to council things, that we have to always be sure we include the upcoming generation of Bradfordians so they don't feel they are shut out of the loop because that brings discontent. I can sympathise with them utterly because it must be awful to be a young couple, perhaps with their first child on the way, who are searching around desperately for somewhere to live, not somewhere fancy, just somewhere to be together, and they literally can't afford to do so. Children can't afford to leave their parents' homes. When I was a young girl, as soon as you were 18 you were off. These days you can't do that, and you see people of 28 still living with their mum and dad because they can't move out.

"It's the same with the cultural life of Bradford. We have to be very careful that we include Bradfordians in that, not just include a cultural elite. The same thing happens in Cornwall, there's an elite of money people, people rich enough to afford that kind of activity and who are a part of the loop and there are the rest of us because, to some extent, I'm not really included in that loop, although I get invited in now and again as a guest but then I go away again. Things go on the same in Cornwall as in Bradford - I don't see a lot of difference except one's by the sea and one's by the moors."

Joolz @ Bradford's Bronte Burlesque

Borrowed Light is written from the point of view of Astra who becomes her mother's carer. We asked Joolz if this is a situation women can easily empathise with. She says: "I think it's telling that the person who feels obliged to care for her ailing mother is Astra, not her brother Lance. He is never asked to do that, in fact he's never really asked to do anything. She occasionally asks him to give a little help in the house but no one suggests at any point that Lance be the carer even though he's rooted in Cornwall. Astra had to give up her university career in Bradford to do this. We find that's often the case, that older sisters are required to be the carers. There are boys that are carers but on the whole it's women who are expected to care if something happens.

"Inadvertently Astra becomes her younger sister's mother and this is a theme that runs through the book but I can't give too much away. There are a lot of secrets about being mothers, and a lot of discussion about what it is to be a mother, and to be a mother to somebody who is not actually your blood child which is quite a different thing altogether. Women do have extra burdens of care placed on them that guys don't and, actually, just wouldn't do."

But the book also concerns itself with more universal themes: "I think I wanted to look at what romantic love actually is because it's pushed in Western society that romantic love is everything but, very often, if you are the object of somebody being madly in love with you it's not actually very pleasant at all but we dress it up in this hypocritical romantic guise. It's terribly Neanderthal because it becomes the pursued and the pursuer and young women are supposed to pretend that they don't mind being pursued or obsessively texted by people, or whatever, because that's their role but sometimes these emotions are not quite as straightforward as they might be. Also there's the enormous emotional burden of keeping secrets, especially if they are somebody else's. I think we've all been in the position when we've seen a friend in a bar and you know he's married and he has come up to you and said, 'Please don't tell my wife because we are going through a difficult patch' and you're then in the position of thinking, 'I know his wife, and I like her very much, and she's a very decent woman.' I'm now holding his secret and every time I meet her I've got to look her in the face and say, 'Hi. How are you?' knowing he's having an affair which is a very common thing. What do you do ethically? Secrets are always horrible and obsession is always horrible."

In 2005 Joolz joined the ranks of most talked-about writers when she was short-listed for the Orange Prize but this was not without its problems: "It changes your whole life upside-down. The personal stress is colossal. I wouldn't recommend it for an experience to anybody. You really have to put it away afterwards and I am very, very grateful to have been short-listed but I don't want to do it again much. You hope you'll be nominated for another one at some point in the future but I have learned an awful lot of lessons from it. For me the majority of the publicity of the Orange Prize that year was concentrated on me because of what I look like and because my book was considered so shocking which I don't think it is at all. The press considered it to be a shocking and dark book to be short-listed for what they think of as a women's prize. I got a lot of attention and some of it was not very pleasant.

"The press are very bigoted against someone who has had body modifications. A journalist phoned me to arrange an interview and said to me, 'How does it feel to be a person who looks as you do, nominated for a proper literature prize?' and the bigotry, patronage and insult hidden in that sentence is quite astonishing. What they want when they say things like that is for you to become aggressive because that's what they think you will do, but they don't understand that I've been heavily tattooed for over 20 years so I'm quite used to that attitude. The only way you can dealing with it is by saying, 'I don't think it's got anything to do with the writing, it [the shortlisting] is down to the writing,' and it was. You have to be very calm but it's not that you feel, calm, not at all. You have to behave calmly, otherwise you give them what you want."

Joolz is also looking to the future: "I'm currently writing another novel which is set in Bradford and is about a feral child. This is no Mowgli [from The Jungle Book]. This is a dark, fantastical and quite frightening book, I think, and deals with another aspect of love really, and self-sacrifice, and also what society considers is appropriate and what it doesn't, and how people are brought up and conditioned, how they behave and what is expected of us. Wild Thing is a child who has basically been brought up by dogs in an outlying farm because he was the illegitimate child in a strictly religious family. The child was consigned to the barn where it was brought up by dogs. He's not an animal, but he's not a human being either and my heroine who is a social worker finds him and it's her response to him given her past, which is the centre core of the book."

But, we point out, in some cultures story tellers are respected. Certainly Joolz sees herself as being part of that tradition, sometimes with unusual results: "There are two things that have happened in my life as a story teller which I thought were very archaic and interesting. Once in Ireland I was paid for writing a poem by a man who gave me a gold ring, just as the bards of old were given a gold ring by the lord of the court. He was a tinker guy and it was all done unconsciously which I thought was fascinating.

"I was asked by the Royal Armouries to write a poem about Remembrance Day and they said they didn't have a lot of money so I said I'd have something out of the Museum shop. Barter is much better and I got paid with a broad sword. I think I must be the only living poet in the western world who has been paid in armaments - with a sword in the old way.  I think what it is that I do is so old, so archaic, so absolutely human that, in a way, it almost bypasses current fashions and culture, and the reason I've been very grateful I've been able to support myself over the years without grants, is because the thing that I do, the telling of stories both verbally and on the page or in drawings, or whatever, is a particularly human thing."