Meet Kate ...(and book giveaway)

…as in Kate Atkinson. Unfortunately she’s not a friend of mine but I wish she were, as she seems to be to the kind of woman I admire and respect. She’s intelligent, clever, witty, without any false modesty and above she is a writer.

Kate Atkinson is a well known author from York who moved up to Scotland many years ago. She became well known for her book Behind the Scenes at the Museum, a story which follows a few generations of a family living in the centre of town and touches on how it feels like living in a museum when you live in York, but is more a tale about families and their peculiarities. Kate describes the sense of history with great affection in the first pages of the novel:
“Guy Fawkes was born here, Dick Turpin was hung a few streets away and Robinson Crusoe, that other great hero, is also a native son of this city. Who is to say which of these is real and which a fiction?”
But the book that has really conquered my absolute devotion to Kate is her last one “When Will There Be Good News” the third installment of the Jackson Brodie’s detective stories, although you don’t need to have read the previous two ones, Case Histories and One Good Turn, to enjoy the last one.
Last Thursday evening I had the pleasure to attend one of her readings/talks at York St John University, an event of the York Literature Festival. I love going to authors readings and meeting my favourite authors, if only for a few fleeting moments, but this time I was hoping not to be disappointed as I like Kate’s novel o much. Of course I wasn’t.
After reading an excerpt from her still unpublished new novel, which will be out in August, she talked about her beginnings in York and her first steps as a writer, where she gets her ideas from, how she creates her characters, etc. all in her own very wry English humour. She then answered all our questions and ended up with a book signing.

I told her how much I love her writing as, when you read her stories, you don’t want to rush to the end, but you also really appreciate her language, her “nice sentences” as she calls them. Kate’s stories encapsulate her wit and pathos as a writer of fiction, and the joy that she takes in reading it aloud proves her own claim to be a ‘cheerful writer’.

To celebrate Kate, I’m giving away one of her books and because I have already had a giveaway on my friend Maria Grazia’s blog FLY HIGH and I don’t want to repeat myself, I’m offering the winner to choose among these four books that I love:

Behind The Scenes at the Museum, Case Histories, Human Croquet and When Will There Be Good News. Just leave a comment below and the Easter Bunny will pick the winner on Easter Eve.