By Richard Collins from Aberystwyth

"I started writing back in 1993. I was off work after a small operation and had to sit around for a few weeks so I tried to write. I found it very fulfilling and very rewarding - but it was too hard. I wrote for about a year but I never finished the book. It was badly written and badly thought through and it ended up in the compost bin.

I've always enjoyed reading but if you do a bit of writing yourself, then everything you read, you read with different eyes. You take notice of the way it's been written, the way sentences have been put together. It's like an apprenticeship.

I returned to writing in 2001, to work on 'The Land as Viewed from the Sea'. By then, I felt as if I had a good first chapter. The idea came from a sailing trip in 1996 with friends along the coast of Wales, from Aberystwyth and up past Bardsey Island in North Wales. (Yes, it was a long gestation period!)

I began writing the novel in Easter 2001 and the first draft took about a year. Most of the writing was done in a leaky shed at the bottom of my garden.

To begin with, I wouldn't let anyone read the book. I couldn't tell how good or how bad it was. It could have been excruciating! Gradually though, I let a few people read it.

I did some more work on the novel during the summer of 2002. I then sent it to various literary agents as well as to Seren Books. I thought if I sent it off about ten times, I could then forget about it.

A couple of the refusals I received were quite positive even though they didn't want to take me on. Then on 12 April 2003, I got a very charming letter from Seren saying that they would like to publish my book.

As far as I understand it, publishing is a bit like being on a conveyer belt so it was quite a long time before I began working with an editor. 'The Land as Viewed from the Sea' was finally published in May 2004.

I didn't have a launch party. I'm too shy for that. It was a low-key launch and it got only one review - in the Sunday Independent. It wasn't a brilliant review. In fact, it was rather a bad review.

By the beginning of November, I assumed the book was taking a bit of a nose-dive and that it would quietly fade away. By then, it had sold about 500-600 copies.

It was around that time I got a phone call to say the book had been shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel prize! I had to keep quiet about it for two weeks before the news came out on Front Row on Radio Four (a programme I always listen to).

Since then, life has been rather frantic. I've done a series of interview - for BBC Radio Wales and for various newspapers, including the Telegraph, the Times and the London Evening Standard.

The category winners of the Whitbread prize will be announced on 6 January 2005 and the overall winner at an awards ceremony on the 25th.

I've since written a second novel which I hope to get published and I'm not working on a third."

By Richard Collins who's a lecturer in estate skills at the Institute of Rural Studies in Llanbadarn, Aberystwyth.

The eventual winner of the 2005 Whitbread First Novel was 'Eve Green' by Susan Fletcher, which is also set in Mid Wales. The other two novels on the shortlist were 'Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell' by Susanna Clark and 'The Maze' by Panos Karnezis.