Emma came to short fiction relatively late. This is how it happened.

I relish the length and complexity of novels, although they’re hard work. But stories crowd into my head all the time, and I have to swat them away so as not to be diverted. Often, a scribble in a notebook is all that saves them from being lost in the ether. For a long time, I couldn’t see how I could conjure up a world – a living, breathing world, as full of ideas and connections as that of my novels – in so few words. And so often it’s a historical world that I want to bring to life, which in some ways is particularly difficult.

But in the second year of my MPhil I had an almost-finished novel and a workshop full of intelligent critics, and it was too good an opportunity to waste. I set out to experiment with things – point of view, tense, narrator, voice, structure – that you can’t change once you’re committed to the long haul of a novel. Liberation! I found that I could write the first draft of a short story in a weekend or two, sit back and see the reach and arc of it at one look, then stoop over it again and set to on the re-writing. And I found that I could explore all those stories that I’d been swatting away: the Tsar’s racehorse trainer peddling matches in 1920s London; the lad sent to wait on the King’s condemned brother-in-law; the woman with the body that’s partly machine, standing in the London Eye…