The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Life changed by writing
AMY MASON was a troubled young woman.
After leaving school at 16, she drifted aimlessly from job to job.
Things would only get worse as she left her teenage years behind.
Her twenties were marred by depression and lack of purpose. She was unable to follow through on basic tasks and spent increasing amounts of time living on incapacity benefit.
But then she discovered writing — and her life has never been the same.
Amy, who has just won the Dundee International Book Prize, worth £10,000, discovered writing when she was 25.
“The writing class really changed my life,” she said.
“It was such an encouraging thing to do and, even though it was a 10-week course, it was the first thing I’d completed for years and years.
“I think I’d always wanted to write and I read a lot, but I just had no confidence, particularly having not done well at school,” the 32-year-old added.
Since taking on the course, however, her life has never been the same, working for theatre groups and writing short stories.
Her novel, The Other Ida, clinched her the prestigious £10,000 prize and will now be released by Cargo Publishing.
But Amy doesn’t believe she could have written it without the angst and depression of her twenties — and plenty of her own experiences are clear to see in the novel.
She said: “The book is about a troubled angry girl in her twenties and when I look at it now I think I was very much like her.
“But now she seems so far away from me, almost like a caricature. I can’t believe it.”
Amy, who lives in Oxfordshire, is now hoping to continue with her writing, which also recently included The Islanders, which won the 2013 Ideas Tap/Underbelly Edinburgh Fringe Fund.
She said it was a “dream come true” to win the prize.
Amy added: “It is such an enormously encouraging thing to happen.”