The Secret Of My Success

Two Hampshire authors have won national prizes for their debut novels. Overnight success is a myth as they tell Duncan Hall and Rebecca Fletcher

It took three “very bad” unpublished novels and five years of hard writing for Petersfield’s Angela Chadwick to be awarded the Polari First Book Prize in October.

The 38-year-old was shocked to even be longlisted for the national prize for LGBT writing. “The book came out last October,” she says on the same morning she has sent her second novel to her agent. “I thought it had its run. I was so grateful.”

XX is about the consequences of a revolutionary new process to create a baby girl from two women, told from the point of view of one of the first mothers, Jules, as she wrestles with her own doubts, voracious press attention and attacks from a careerist politician.

Angela came up with the idea of ovum-to-ovum fertilisation at 17 in an A Level biology class, but the impetus to write XX came much later – after she saw prominent women were being trolled on social media. “It made me quite angry,” says Angela. “It just connected with the idea of ovum-to-ovum fertilisation and how it might be received in today’s society. The plot and characters stemmed from those big ideas.”

Having seen three previous novels rejected by agents and publishers she noticed a difference with XX. “I still got rejections for the finished novel, but they were near-miss rejections,” she says. One of the major sticking points was Jules’ working class background. “I grew up in Petersfield which is an affluent and middle class town,” says Angela. “But my dad worked in a factory, my mum was a dinner lady and we lived in a damp and grotty council house. That sense of belonging to a small town but not quite fitting in was something I wanted to explore.”