‘I want to tell stories about women on the margins’

Meet Stacey Halls, one of the 10 shortlisted Women’s Prize For Fiction and Good Housekeeping Futures writers. Her latest novel, Mrs England, is her third

With Mrs England, I knew I wanted to write about two things: the fairy-tale setting of Hardcastle Crags in West Yorkshire and coercive control. The atmosphere and seclusion of the place – it feels cut off from society and even time – spoke to me. I also wanted to explore emotional abuse through a historical gaze. Coercive control was only made a crime in 2015, although, of course, it has always existed. There was just no knowledge of it. Tell us about your journey to publication.

This is my third novel, and the first draft was written in the first half of 2020.

I went into my own sort of lockdown before the rest of the world, moving to Hebden Bridge to write it. It was my first time living alone and the first time I’d lived near my family in a decade, so I had an idyllic three months writing, reading, walking and having friends and family to stay before everything shut down. This is also the first novel I’ve written as a full-time author, so I had more time to

pick over it, take it apart and put it together again. What motivates you as an author?

I suppose you’re always trying to write a better book than the one before. You hope the next one will be the best thing you’ll ever write and then, the minute you begin, it always falls short. Russell T Davies says writing is an act of loss, which sounds quite depressing, but it’s true. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given?

Show, don’t tell. My novels are all heavily researched, but I try not to put in any more historical detail than you would find in a contemporary novel. What do you think you would be if you weren’t a writer?

In a dream world, an actor, but I doubt I’d be very good. I auditioned for the part of Luna Lovegood in the Harry

Potter films when I was 15 and that’s the extent of my brush with stardom. What’s your favourite Women’s Prize-winning book?

I’ve been a huge Maggie O’farrell fan for years, and Hamnet is my favourite of her novels. Its sense of immediacy is astonishing and, although you know it’s about the death of a child, it’s so compelling I read it like a thriller. What do you hope to have achieved as a writer in 10 years’ time?

I hope to continue to tell stories about women in the past that bring them into the present. For too long women have existed on the margins of history and I feel it’s my duty to bring them out and on to the page.