Dominique Kyle

Tell us a little bit about yourself, your hobbies and interests.

I started out in a profession allied to psychology/psychiatry and then later on I did a degree in Contemporary Applied Arts and set up a ceramics studio. Now I mainly write.

When and why did you start writing books?

When I was a child, I loved books and read and reread my favourite ones. I attempted to write my first book at the age of seven, but found it was much harder to do than I expected and I found myself rehashing other people's stories. When I became a young adult, I was frustrated by the lack of decent books to read and so annoyed by the nanny-state that controlled the content for my age group that I started writing stories of my own for my friends at school. I found that I now was coming up with interesting and original content, and that my friends were eagerly awaiting the next episode.

What made you decide to tackle writing as a career?

I always wanted to get a novel published but once I was an adult, I was shy of showing my work to anyone. I thought I was a pretty good writer, but the first exposure to critical readers is a brutal process. However, once I stopped whimpering in a corner and listened to the feedback with an open mind, I usually found that the readers had a point, and it helped me improve my writing skills. Contrary to popular perception, writing a good novel is difficult to do and takes endless hours of hard work and dedication. But I feel driven to write. During the years that I put it aside I suffered from repeat dreams that I had just found all my pet animals neglected in dark and dirty hutches, half-starved. In the dream I cried and felt guilty that I'd forgotten to feed them and look after them. Finally, I realised that those animals represented my neglected books, and that I needed to feed and care for them and bring them out into the light.

Which one of your books or characters is your favourite?

Whichever one I am currently writing.

Which one of your books was the hardest to write and stretched you the most as a writer?

'Purgatory is a Place Too'. I was beginning to feel that the next book that I wrote about my young stock car racing driver heroine needed to have a solving crime element. Then my brother came for Christmas and told me all about his work trying to gather evidence to get a local grooming gang in his area convicted of trafficking underage girls for sex. There has been a long running scandal in Britain over the fact that a number of these gangs have set themselves up all over the country and the authorities have mainly turned a blind eye and failed to protect the young girls being abused by these men. I realised that this was exactly the sort of thing that my feisty feminist heroine would take on, but it was a delicate line to tread for me as the author since the majority of the men in these gangs came from one particular ethnic group. I had find a way of telling the story honestly, but without stirring up racial hatred, and while being fair to the majority of people from that part of the world who are law abiding citizens.

Who is your favourite author and book?

I don't have one. Every book has its flaws, and because every reader is a unique personality, we all react differently to the characters, plot and style of each book. However I did find myself completely mesmerised recently by Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall'. My husband bought it for me thinking that it was the first book in the series (it isn't, it's the middle one) and because it is written in a very unusual style, I couldn't even work out who was narrating the story until halfway through. On first reading, I thought I loved 'Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow' by Peter Hoeg, but on rereading it, I realised that the story makes no sense whatsoever and the ending is rubbish. But Miss Smilla herself is an amazing invention. This year, I read 'The Handmaid's Tale' by Margaret Atwood. I was ashamed that I had never read this seminal feminist work and thought that I had better rectify this. I assumed that since it was written back in 1985, it would be showing its age, but in fact it was a brilliant, totally gripping story, from the first word to the last, and it is like a puzzle set for the reader as you have to work out bit by bit what is going on.

What book are you reading right now?

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez.

Where do you get your inspiration for your books?

From everything I ever do, see and hear.

What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?

I live in the mountains, so I do a lot of walking, cycling and climbing. In the summer, I spend most of my time crewing a boat off the coast of the highlands and islands of Scotland.

Do you have any new books in the works?

Yes, it is a New Adult novel called 'Sex, Lies, and Kawasaki'. The narrative is split between two eighteen-year-old girls who have arrived in the university town of Oxford, England for the summer. They get themselves into lots of trouble when they are sucked into the nefarious activities of a local biker gang. There's plenty of action, romance and tension alongside intelligent character development. I like my books to be thoughtful at the same time as being entertaining.