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Kate was born in York in 1951 and lived in the city throughout her childhood and teenage years. On asking her about the importance of these years she answers: "I think they (childhood years) influenced me a lot - my imagination was fostered by the Castle Museum."
I think they (childhood years) influenced me a lot - my imagination was fostered by the Castle Museum.
York Castle Museum, which opened in 1938, contains exhibits which show how people in Britain used to live, in recreations of rooms, shops and streets.
Kate’s first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, has been adapted for theatre, radio, and television. It won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year award, and begins in a family home above a pet shop in one of the ancient streets beneath York Minster. 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?”
Kate was brought up in Stonegate, in the shadow of York Minster. Her eyes light up as she describes Stonegate as “a dark place” with the feel of a “Dickensian film set”. However, she tells us sadly that the York of today is now a very different place from the York of her childhood, when she would have seen the likes of the Minster restoration, and the founding of the University in 1963.
Kate later studied English Literature at Dundee University, gaining her Masters Degree in 1974. After leaving university, she took on a variety of jobs from legal secretary to teacher, and initially wrote for women's magazines after winning the 1986 Woman's Own Short Story Competition. She lived in the coastal town of Whitby, North Yorkshire for a while, before moving to Scotland, where she taught at Dundee University and began writing short stories.
Kate now lives in Edinburgh, and sadly all of her family have moved out of the city which was once her home. Although she visits it quite often, these visits are work related. Despite this apparent distance from her birthplace, Kate often returns to York in her fiction, saying: "I love the idea of going back in to the past."
The past is a recurring theme in many of Kate’s novels, including Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Human Croquet (1997) and Emotionally Weird (2000). Her latest books are Case Histories (2004), and One Good Turn (2006), the latter of which was short listed for the British Book Awards Crime Thriller of the Year, and described by Stephen King as ‘the best mystery of the decade’.
On Tuesday evening she treated York students to a short story entitled Temporal Anomaly from her collection Not the End of the World (2002). Kate’s story encapsulates her wit and pathos as a writer of fiction, and the joy that she takes in reading it aloud proves her own claim to being a ‘cheerful writer’.
Kate’s visit was one of a series of readings organised by The Department of English and Related Literature. Graham Swift, Booker Prize winning novelist and short-story writer, gave a reading last month. There are plans to invite Marina Lewcka, author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. Both Graham and Marina studied at York.
As a student of English Literature, it is interesting to hear from the writers who are connected with York, the city in which I will spend my university life. Kate later confided in us that: "There’s much less inspiration in writing than people would like to believe." Instead, her inspiration is what she refers to as no more than a ‘little spark’. I hope that one of those sparks for Kate was her experience of living in York.
Click here to see our Arts review of Kate's reading.
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