Amy Sackville: winner of John Llewellyn Rhys Prize

Amy Sackville has won this year's John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for her debut novel, The Still Point.

The judges hailed her ‘beautifully restrained prose’ and the ‘startling originality of her voice’. The book is part Arctic adventure, part haunting love story. When Edward Mackley vanishes during a doomed attempt to reach the North Pole at the turn of the twentieth century, he leaves behind a young wife, Emily. She stoically awaits his return for 60 years, sacrificing her own dreams as she preserves Edward’s memory.

A hundred years later, on a hot summer day, Emily’s great-grand-niece Julia makes her own exploration through the family house she has inherited – a virtual memorial to Edward. As Julia trawls through Edward’s diary she sinks into depression and towards an old family secret that forces her to reassess her own relationship and desires.

We caught up with Amy to talk about how we juggled the book, her degree and jobs; what she's been reading this year and her feelings on winning.

> Congratulations on winning the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize this year. How does it feel?

I'm delighted and surprised and honoured, of course.

> Have you read any of the other books on the shortlist?

I regret to say I haven't, but will certainly be adding them to the insurmountable pile. I'm interested to read Delusions of Gender, particularly.

> What has been your favourite book of the year?

I've been reading a lot this year, but much of it has been catching up on stuff I really should have read before now - Bolano, Sebald, Robbe-Grillet... As far as recent releases go, I very much enjoyed Wolf Hall, and also Lorrie Moore's The Collected Stories; for non-fiction, I've just finished Gabriel Josipovici's Whatever Happened to Modernism?, which I found wonderfully passionate and personal and written with great lucidity.

> Did you expect your book to be shortlisted?

It didn't cross my mind. I don't think I could get through my days if I thought like that.

> Tell us about the writing process for the book. How did set about writing it and getting it published?

I started thinking about the Arctic in summer 2007, and decided to build on some fragments of prose on that theme as a first submission for my MA at Goldsmiths. I'd gone into the course wanting to work on a single project, so focused on developing that first chunk for the rest of the year. Having that motivation was invaluable; I work better under pressure. I worked part-time in temp jobs while studying, so I had to be fairly disciplined about making myself write in the time I had available; having left full-time work with the intention of writing a book, I was determined to feel I was going somewhere by the end of the course. Once I had the plot mapped out, it was a case of just getting the thing written, revising and reworking as I went, me and my laptop surrounded by paper in the living room of our one-bed flat. By the end of the course it was perhaps two-thirds written, at which point I was very fortunate to be recommended to my agent by a tutor, and by early 2009 I had a manuscript which they placed very happily with Portobello Books.

> The narrative shifts between two contrasting places, the wilds of the Arctic one hundred years ago and the faded grandeur and domesticity of the old family home in Surrey. What methods did you use to ensure that both narratives fused together so fittingly?

The idea of the past and the present being interwoven, so that the two narrative strands were constantly intruding upon and informing each other, was an important aspect of the book, formally and thematically, from very early on. The idea that the historical Arctic narrative is being shaped in the present, as well as having left its impression on it, is essentially what the book is about - as the epigraph says, 'do not call it fixity, where past and future are gathered.' So my task was to find a way to structure it around that principle of layering and interaction, without it becoming too contrived or distracting for the reader. I basically got it all written and then rearranged it in chunks until it worked.

> The desolate uninhabited islands that lie in the most northern regions of the Arctic Circle remain a mystery to most of us. How did you carry out your research about these strange, lonely places and transform them into such convincing settings for your explorer, Edward Mackley?

I clipped any pictures I came across of the region - the way the light falls was of particular interest to me. I also read a lot of explorers' accounts, and poached from them shamelessly. But I also think it's that mystery and strangeness that I'm drawn to - that these places are on the edge of what is imaginable is an idea that repeats throughout the book.

> You have been compared to Virginia Woolf for your use of stream of consciousness within The Still Point. What made you resist transforming the entirety of the text using this technique?

I think the Woolf comparisons have more to do with the shifting between viewpoints; I think what interests me in Woolf is her use of a shifting, limited third-person perspective. I wanted to somehow combine that with a more overtly omniscient voice, so that there is an occasional address to the reader, and moments where the narrator steps back from the action, because that seemed to me to add another dimension to the question of how 'knowable' another person is. There are the short italicised passages of Julia's 'stream of consciousness' in there too, but it wouldn't have occurred to me to write the whole book like that - it would have been impossible to tell the story in that way, I think; I needed that ability to pull back as well as to close in.

> What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given as a writer?

That writing is a process of crafting, of reworking, revising, refashioning. That I don't have to get it right first time.

> What can we expect next from you?

I'm working on a short novel at the moment set in Orkney. Hopefully it should be finished early next year. More ambiguous love stories and bleak northern landscapes.