AUTHOR PROFILE
Jane Cable
The commercial fiction writer talks to Margaret James about her two separate writing identities
Margaret James
Novelist Jane Cable, who also writes as Eva Glyn, comes from a family of writers and other creative people, and says she is sure her background helped her to realise her own writing ambitions.
‘While I was growing up, it seemed entirely normal to want to write stories,’ she says. ‘My late father Mercer Simpson was a poet, literary critic and reader for the Welsh Arts Council. One of his (much older) cousins was John Hampson, an author and fringe member of the Bloomsbury Group.’
I asked Jane to tell me a little about the central characters in both her Jane Cable and Eva Glyn novels. ‘My characters vary so much,’ she says. ‘My first few books feature only contemporary characters. But, over the last couple of years, I’ve found the confidence to give voices to people from other eras, too.
‘I write from both male and female points of view. Some characters have very specific attributes. Damir in The Olive Grove, for example, needed to have been a child in the shelters of Mostar during the Balkan war of the 1990s, and he changed as I wrote about him. One of the things I love most about the writing process is that characters slip under your skin and develop in their own way. It’s a very special alchemy.’