The Tidal Zone In conversation with Sarah Moss
Sarah Moss is a professor on the Creative Writing programme at Warwick University, as well as an established novelist. Her published books include ‘Cold Earth’, ‘Night Waking’, ‘Signs for Lost Children’ and her most recent release ‘The Tidal Zone’ which has been received with critical acclaim. Her works have been shortlisted for many prestigious awards including the Wellcome Prize, The Walter Scott Prize and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. When and why did you start writing?
I started writing almost as soon as I could read, so it would’ve been about 6 as I learnt to read quite late. I don’t really know why because i was so little at the time but I guess it’s because i was reading a lot and it was what I wanted to do, I wanted to make stories as well as reading them.
Your latest novel, The Tidal Zone, is being released this summer. Could you give us a quick summary of it?
Sure, my elevator pitch. It’s a book about a family putting together a new normal after their teenage daughter nearly dies on the school playing fields. It’s not a book about trauma, it’s a book about what happens after trauma, about how you rebuild family life in the weight of crisis. It’s about adolescence and letting go from a parent’s point of view and how much harder it is to give independence to a child who you know is fragile and whose mortality you’ve just been
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