HILARY BOYD
Success was a long time coming for The Lavender House author, she tells Margaret James
Margaret James
AUTHOR PROFILE
Hilary Boyd’s debut novel Thursdays in the Park was a huge bestseller, and since then she has written several more very successful stories. The Lavender House is now out in paperback and her latest, A Perfect Husband, is out in hardback in July.
With this kind of track record, you might suppose Hilary must come from a literary family, but this isn’t really the case. ‘Both my grandfathers were politicians,’ she says. ‘My mother’s father was Minister of Food during the Second World War: he was the Dig for Victory man. But in the 1950s my own father was briefly a copywriter for Schweppes soft drinks, and he often used to draw cartoons and write silly rhymes for us. Also, everyone in the family was an obsessive reader.
‘I didn’t start writing fiction until I was in my forties. This was after I did an English degree in my thirties. Although – amazingly – Thursdays in the Park was snapped up straight away, it was actually my fifth novel.
HILARY’S TOP TIPS
• Read as much as you can, looking at how other writers construct their books.