Profiles

Louise Dean has lived in Provence in the south east of France for five years now. Living in an idyllic rural paradise and taking weekend breaks to St Tropez you wouldn’t think that she misses her home town of Cranbrook at all. 

However, this is where you’d be wrong, “Yes, of course I miss Kent.  I have great memories of the area, you know, of doing the traditional Kentish things: hop picking, cherry picking and the rest! I love the Kent countryside and the atmosphere of towns like Tunbridge Wells. And of course I have a lot of family there too so I’m a frequent visitor whenever I can.”

Influence of Kent

Dean’s novels tend to be about faraway places, such as the distant Caribbean, Northern Ireland and in her work in progress, Kenya. But has the county influenced her writing at all? “Yes,” she says. “Certain attitudes of the people of Kent and Sussex have definitely influenced me, you know, the way that they are quite modest in terms of their ambitions. You can certainly see these kind of characters in my first novel, Becoming Strangers, in George for example, with his very down to earth and modest sort of nature – that is a very Kentish thing.”

While Dean’s first novel, published in 2004, was a huge achievement, she admits that she wasn’t always so successful: “I think that writing is much like making pancakes; the first one or two, in my case, have got too much fat in them, so you have to throw them away. But when I wrote Becoming Strangers I just knew that it was different – that it worked.  This was mainly down to the fact that I was so fond of the characters I was writing about, like George and Annemieke.”

Career

Despite it being her full time job now, Dean did not begin her career as a writer. “I worked in advertising in Asia and then went to the United States and owned a small ad agency with a couple of partners there. But, in 1999, when I was 29, the agency folded.” However, Dean didn’t see this as a disaster, “without wanting to sound clichéd, I saw it as an opportunity. I was pretty sick of advertising and was lucky to meet my partner, John, who supported me throughout the writing of my first novel and since then I’ve never really looked back.”

Dean’s second novel, This Human Season, a book about the political troubles in Northern Ireland also received good reviews, being described as ‘a hugely fine and thoughtful read.’ 

When I first contacted her she said that it was perfect timing as she had just completed her third novel, a statement which she now takes back. “Well, I wish I could say that I’ve just finished but people laugh because every couple of months I’ll say ‘I’ve finished a novel!’ then realise that I haven’t and then re-draft it all again and so that is what I’m doing now.” 

When asked what this new book is about she describes it as “a modern book about the first psychiatrist in Kenya in the 1930s. It’s a book that began about madness but has gradually turned into a book about sadness.” 

Humour

Dean’s novels are famed for touching on the grim, darker side of life in a comic way, having the ability to ‘find humour and decency in the most awful of places.’ This is a characteristic that is very proud of, seeing humour as important not only in literature but in everyday life: “I think that the ability to laugh in very difficult circumstances is the greatest triumph of the human species. Even in my novel about the difficulties in Northern Ireland, where men are dying for what they believe in, I use humour. I think there’s a heroism and a beauty in being able to laugh in hard or traumatic situations, and this is quite often the only thing that keeps us sane at times!”

Free Time

On the phone, Dean sounds relaxed and jovial. Her secret? Drink and reality TV. “Writers aren’t meant to say that are they?!  They’re meant to be all high-brow and intellectual but I love reality TV like The Apprentice, I just get addicted!”

Dean appears optimistic about her future, confident with her writing but also illustrating some of that ‘Kentish down-to-earth modesty’ that she speaks about.  When asked about her hopes for herself as a writer she admits to having “the classic living mania of the writer – on the one hand I’d like to be the greatest living writer, with a library shelf full of books, but on the other I’d quite like to be left alone in my garden with my kids so it wildly veers between the two. 

But I do hope to produce at least ten books in my lifetime, although I do say after each book, ‘That’s my last one!’ but then I said that after each child as well!”