Authors' Spaces: Roshi Fernando

Continuing Booktrust's series on authors and where they write. Today, award-winning author of the collection, Homesick, Roshi Fernando.

I work in a study next to the kitchen, which means I spend a lot of time eating. The room is very badly wallpapered (I did it myself last summer when I was in-between edits) and is thankfully lined with many bookshelves. On the walls I have two portraits of me, drawn and painted by my two youngest children to the left of my desk, a Suffragette poster entitled The Cat and Mouse Act behind me (bought on a school trip when I was 12), and to my right I have an original Eve Arnold photo of Marilyn Monroe, lying back in a chair, her arm splayed out sideways, a huge smile on her face. In front of me is my medium format Mamiya RB 67 camera, perched on its tripod - I photograph my children. Their childhood took place only in summer if you look at the photos. Behind the camera is a yoga mat and ironing board (used for craft projects - I never iron clothes), and hanging on a bookshelf is my guitar. The curtain looks like a quilt - I made it with leftover bits of upholstery fabric. I have made all the curtains in this house: many, many curtains. I made quilts for my children, and knitted blankets to wrap them in when they were babes.  I make EVERYTHING - clothes, food, socks, shelves, pictures, and books.

On my desk there are four mugs/jugs/penholders full of the choicest, juiciest pencils, pens and paintbrushes. The laptop is atop the Shorter Oxford Dictionary. There has to be a box of tissues on the desk at all times, because I am allergic to everything.  It hasn't impaired our pet owning: two dogs, two cats, chickens and ducks. They belong to other people - the tortoises are mine.

On a lower bookshelf, there is a pile of grimy notebooks: my handwritten diaries, started when I was thirteen. The current journal is on my desk. I write it with an extra fine nibbed fountain pen, in a Silvine notebook, ref. no. 141. I order them in packs of ten. I've been using them for about twenty five years.  I'm 44 - so not that old, but these venerable systems give me a grounding, a safety. I suppose, roots where there were none.

On the windowsill there is ephemera. A picture of me when I was seventeen, a doll my sister made for me when I was five, a sculpture of someone reading a book, my father's cricket ball, his old camera, a number of plastic dinosaurs that belonged to my son, a no longer working clockwork mouse, a moneybox in the shape of a letterbox, my plastic dalek sans arms (Christmas present when I was ten), a bust of Socrates, many wooden animals, sea shells from Sri Lanka, a piece of stone I picked up from my father's graveside, a plaster model of my teeth which I use as an incense burner when the dog has farted and a very beautifully painted ceramic frog with the words 'swear jar' painted by my youngest daughter when she was six. There are three transistor radios dotted about on the bookshelves. None of them work. And baby shoes. And hats.

Everywhere there is dust: but I have a satisfaction that it is MY skin, my dust...

Roshi Fernando is the author of the short story collection, Homesick (Impress) and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award 2011.