“I try to make each sentence as fresh as it can be”

The Booker-longlisted novelist on writing about his hometown and his efforts to make his prose flow

- Rutvik Bhandari

What inspired Seascraper, and how did the story develop from that first burst of idea into a novel?

It began with an impulse to write about where I grew up. I grew up on the northwest coast of England in a dreary town called Southport. I was drawn to writing about home without actually putting a name on it.

The more I thought about it, a photograph that my younger brother had taken of a shed on wheels parked up on the beach kept popping up. Iknew what it was, a shrimping vessel, but Ihad never really thought of the industry as a whole and how big it was where I grew up. Slowly I grew attached to the idea of writing about one of these people, because I could place myself on that beach with them. I could project myself empathetically into that character. And I would say that was the starting point.