When I was told I was on the shortlist for the 2008 Wales Book of the Year award, I was talking on a payphone on the coast of Morocco – far from where I’d done the writing. I was wildly excited. This was it: I’d spent 10 years living and working in remote places, with very little money, rain pouring through the roof, all that sort of thing. The prize was the conclusion to everything that I’d been working towards, or at least it felt like that.

You can work on a book for years before you actually work on it. I’d been plotting and writing this novel for about four years, in increasingly obscure cottages in the depths of Wales. When I finished the book, I was living up above the Elan valley reservoirs in the Cambrian mountains. There was a very cranky generator that broke down at will. The lights surged on and off all the time; it was better to use candlelight and paraffin lamps.