What was the first thing you did this morning?
I went for a dawn swim at the city beach down the road. This is a useful daily habit for me because, as a night owl, it can take hours for executive function to kick in, and the time I spend in the sea would otherwise be wasted lying in bed deciding what to do first. The hit induced by cold water is like taking a wrap of speed, and the focus and energy and excitement from my swim often drives a day’s creative output. I don’t swim about, just tread water and let my mind float and surge and race. And then I dream a bit more while warming up in the bath afterwards.
Where are you right now? What can you see from your workspace?
I have the laptop on my knee, sitting in the living room of my tower-block flat, which looks out over the volcanic hills of Holyrood Park in Edinburgh. This end of the park is very wild – below the window is a cherry wood, full of snowy blossom in spring, and above that, rough hillside – gorse and heather. Right now a wisp of cloud is creeping up through the blaeberries and stunted birch, like a grey wolf stalking. Soon I’ll stop to watch the sun set behind the bridges across the Firth of Forth, which remind me so much of the great bridges across the Menai Straits which I grew up beside. Beyond the Firth, which I imagine as the straits, the sun burns white on the snow of Munros in the distant highlands, stretched all the way from west to east. Seeing mountains spread out like that; ranks of them guarding a hundred miles of woods and rivers and lochs and valleys, many of which I know well, but some of which I may never see… it sets my imagination racing every single day. It’s what I’m used to, growing up on a bryn near the landward coast of Ynys Mon, looking over at Eryri and down the Llyn.
But I won’t lie – to see all this I have to look over a mess of washing piled inside, underwear hanging on the balcony railings, home brew for a book launch swelling its bottles, the barrel I take cold dips in bursting its hoops, bits of tech my sons have left on every surface. But I don’t really see those things – perhaps the best gift of the imagination is the capacity to rise above the need to tidy!
Do you have a creative process, and what does it look like?
I think of myself as a kind of walking radio telescope. I put myself as far out there as I can, always stepping from behind sheltering obstacles, trying to find the right aspect to receive a signal from Out There. Sometimes this is a particular thought or insight or love, and other times just a surge of energy I can’t immediately decode. Then I sit down and write something, which will at least be full of that original energy, until I feel it start to fade, which may be after one hour or after ten. That energy can perpetuate itself, like a chain reaction, once I’ve vividly imagined characters or arguments or settings, and at that stage in a project I can’t wait to be able to get back to it. I have three kids, and channel several freelance pittance streams to feed them, so I can never really achieve a routine that can stand against everyone’s needs, but I do try to make sure that not too much of that energy gets squandered among life’s chaos.
How did your debut novel, The Bloody Branch, come about?
I was an obsessive reader as a child, and always loved the idea of writing stories – always thought I ‘had a novel in me’ – but as time went on, and I got beyond the egoism of early childhood, it seemed that if everyone has a novel in them, the overwhelming statistical likelihood must be that mine would be shite. I was very struck by R.S. Thomas’s poem to an aspiring writer: ‘We are brothers, I admit; but they are no good. I see why you wrote them, but why send them? Why not bury them, as a cat its faeces?’ The fact I wanted to write wasn’t justification to inflict my writing on the world, and I had a living to make and then children to look after. And I guess it wasn’t clear to me what book exactly I would write, anyway. But then my kids got older, didn’t need me 24/7, and eventually I had energy to spare again, which I felt surging around in me without an outlet.
I have a very old friend, one of the most respected poets living, and they eventually lost patience and said – ‘it’s wrong to be able to write as well as you do and not make use of it: go and write a novel now for f*ck’s sake. I bet you have an idea for one.’ And I realised that I did have an idea. All my life experience, of nature and womanhood and motherhood, seemed as though it could find a channel in the oldest stories that I heard as a young child – stories from The Mabinogion. I felt there were things I actually needed to tell and retell. It didn’t feel like self-indulgence anymore, but rather a duty, and I began to believe I could do it well.
What’s been your favourite part of the process so far?
The first time I sat down and wrote all day, while feeling my source material and my characters take control and spin out a story for themselves. The first time I felt myself typing breathlessly, wide-eyed, to find out what might happen next. Felt myself having to wipe away the tears, as tragedies formed themselves with more poignance than I had ever imagined. That’s a pretty uncanny and wonderful experience. Because I spent many years as an academic studying the art of fiction, I was used to thinking of writing as a matter or strategy and careful calibration and construction. I didn’t really believe the talk of characters taking on a life of their own, and underestimated the intuitive forces that take over with imaginative disinhibition. I still think the best writing is informed by a novel’s intellectual perspective, by real experience, by technical verbal ability, and by artistic balance – but these ingredients can play out in concert without one’s conscious, planning mind always orchestrating the whole thing.
What are you reading at the moment?
‘Reading’? Full disclosure: I’m very dyslexic and very busy, so much of what I ‘read’ I listen to on audio book on 2x speed, while doing housework and mechanical admin. I just read Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds – about cephalopods and the nature of consciousness – in a single afternoon, after an amazing close encounter with a friendly octopus in a tide pool. I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of Jonathan Franzen in the last few weeks, and felt his way of reading the world slightly shift my own, as the best fiction can. I’m delighting in the first draft of my daughter Ide Crawford’s giant epic about the French Revolution, which has more to tell us about our own time than all the news put together. I’m relishing some unpublished chapters of my friend Rogelio Luque Lora’s forthcoming book Land, which recently won the St Auburn award from the Royal Society of Literature: Rogelio is keenly awake in nature, every detail he sees sparks startling wider reflection, and his language seems not so much a medium of communication but a perfectly polished lens. Await the book with bated breath.
Tell us about a book that has changed the course of your writing life
Wuthering Heights and Moby Dick are still my greatest inspirations – the proof of concept for so much of the way I want to work. Putting landscape and nature at the heart, as main protagonists; writing with passionate love and awe about natural and human forces which are at the same time dark and destructive and terrifying; combining intellectual and emotional intensity without embarrassment. These books bombed and shocked and disappointed contemporary audiences: they were seen as confusing, ‘wantonly eccentric’, ‘excessive’ in their very qualities, ‘preposterous’, ‘bizarre’, ‘outrageously bombastic’, vulgar, depraved and unnatural. ‘Nightmares and dreams through which devils dance and wolves howl make bad novels,’ said one reviewer – another suggested Brontë should have committed suicide before daring to publish such a terrible book. The kamikaze bravery of these authors is something we should all be grateful for and try to match.
Tell us about a moment that has changed the course of your writing life
Probably the moment I learnt to read – a moment that came later for me because I’m dyslexic. That wasn’t something anyone considered in the eighties, and at primary school, where reading was really the only lesson, I was at first written off as a bit useless. But dyslexic children sometimes learn to read whole sentences at a time rather than looking at the impenetrable individual words, and I leapt straight from total non-reading to proficiency. I remember the winter evening so vividly: sitting with a book on a cooling storage heater, the meaningless monochrome symbols spelling nothing but frustration – lines of text like prison bars. Then quite suddenly it was as though the pages at last opened, and let me slip into a vivid world of infinite depth and colour. In the space of a few magical days I went from crying over Peter and Jane to secretly devouring classics hidden on my lap under my school desk. Maybe my appetite for books, and the imaginative worlds they conjured, was sharper because of the delay. I could have read all day – mostly stories, but also the names in the book of wildflowers, of the shades of my coloured pencils. Every word seemed a gate to a whole new realm for my introverted imagination to explore.
Not being able to read had set me apart in one way, and now in another my obsession with books let me wander off alone. Instead of being at the bottom of the class, I was moved up to learn with older years for the extra challenge. But the rest of my time at school was spent frustrated that I couldn’t go off and do my own thing with my own maverick choice of books. Since then I’ve always felt that reading separated me from the pack, and that’s both an advantage and a challenge as a writer. Coming up with comps (comparative books and authors) is always really hard, and I feel the eccentricity of my approach can sometimes make life harder than it should be for my readers, even though it means I never struggle to find something new to say.
How would your perfect day of writing go?
Windless seven o’clock daybreak – rosy dawn swelling silently on the silky skin of a high tide. Sheer excitement drives me into the sea.
While swimming, I’d be so flooded with visions and ideas that I’d forget the cold, only shaken out by shivers. I’d run home as urgent to get to work as to warm up, and someone loving would bring me three successive cups of black coffee, which would turn out to have just the right dose of caffeine between them. That someone would also hand me the right number of soft warm jumpers, and remind me to go sit by the window before getting down to work (when I have an idea I tend to start typing wherever the computer happens to be charging, which could be uncomfortably in the hall or on the floor). I’d get the seeds of the thoughts down as fast as I could, but feel myself tempted to elaborate each one beyond the original conception, and partially yield to this temptation.
After three or four hours my mind would be racing faster than my typing hands, and I’d need to stop to see where I’d arrived – I’d go out onto the balcony and do HIIT with weights or run to the top of the hill, burning off some of the excess speed – the wind would have risen by now. Then I’d go back to work a little more collected, and see what should be done with the morning’s Ty Hyll, and build numerous extensions. I’d get round to breakfast at 2pm, and feel a bit calmer after that, pausing to gather thoughts before writing them down, watching a gull or a raven riding the unseen wind against the distant clouds, or reeling my mind back in to stillness and detail, resting my eyes on a wildflower in a tiny bottle that the loving person with the coffee and the jumpers would also have put there for me. Oh, and they’ll also have cooked me something healthy with wild vegetables at tea time, and I’ll scoff that with my eyes still on the screen, and keep going till midnight. No stopping on a day like that. I laugh in the face of balance. My moto is nothing in moderation, ever.
What are you working on at the moment?
I like to work on more than one book at once, to have an outlet for different kinds of imaginative energy. I’m writing a prequel to The Bloody Branch, about Rhiannon, a fairy forced to do penance for eating her own baby, and her counterpart, rival and sister – a nameless, childless woman, bereaved by miscarriage and the distant tidal retreat of the Severn over the dull lines of the mud flats. There are characters and arcs in the story not yet filled out, but I’m driven on by visions of the bright fruit and flowers of a fairy feast, and on the parched draining of that deep grey river mouth. I’m also well into a novel about rural gen-X teenagerhood on the verge of a reservoir over a flooded village, and of MTV and the internet – this is a mad dark tale that has to be told, but does anyone want to read it? I’m also mulling over a completed short story about an acetic hermit.
Which piece of writing are you most proud of in your life so far?
It has to be my first novel, The Bloody Branch. As well as being a token of my newfound belief in myself, and the chops that warrant it, it’s also a faithful retelling of the myths of this land, passed down through thousands of years, which I’m proud to be born to hear and learn and carry forward – and also of the natural places I grew up to adore, and which I still think are as lovely and awesome as any on earth. My parents and my children are also in there, in thin mythic disguise, and I’m unspeakably proud of all of them.
Brigid Lowe is a writer from Ynys Môn. She has a doctorate from Oxford and, as an academic at the universities of Sheffield and Cambridge, published a book and many essays on the art of fiction. Her first novel, The Bloody Branch, a botanical-feminist-ecogothic retelling of part of the Mabinogion, will be published by Harvill Secker in January 2026. She lives in Edinburgh with her three children and their phones.
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