Thank you for choosing The Woman in the Photograph. Although I’ve always been an avid reader, I don’t think it really hit me how many books there are in the world until my first novel was published. SO MANY BOOKS! I’m honoured that you chose mine.

My intention for The Woman in the Photograph started with a desire to write a feminist novel about feminism: a novel that was about the feminist movement, but also feminist in approach, centring women and telling their stories in an unapologetic way.

How, though? I’ve always loved photography, and in 2016, I went to ‘The Radical Eye’, a photography exhibition at Tate Modern. It was fascinating in many ways, but the thing that caught my eye most was a single, framed negative of a print. The collector (Elton John) had taken the trouble to buy not just the print, but the negative. He owned the image.

That got me thinking about how different photography has become. The power of a photographer to create, and own, an image, was so much greater on film than it is in the digital world, when everyone has a camera in their pocket and can take hundreds of photographs in a day without much thought. As I walked around the gallery, I thought: what if the world chooses to see a photograph in one way, but the photographer knows that something else happened? And it struck me, too, that ‘the camera never lies’ is, simply, untrue. Especially as the photographer is the one choosing where to point the lens, what to focus on.

So, if I were to write about a female photographer – and if she chronicled an era of the feminist movement – and if there was one image, that suggested a certain truth, but the reality was different . . . that was the first glimmer of The Woman in the Photograph. I spent a couple of hours in the exhibition, and then I walked along the South Bank, and by the end of the afternoon, although I didn’t know what exactly the novel would be, I knew I had the beginnings of it.

I’m immensely proud of The Woman in the Photograph. The writing of it was absorbing, interesting, and at times difficult, especially as I moved between the 1960s and ’70s and the present, and reflected on how, although much has changed for women, it’s probably not as much as the feminists of the second wave hoped for. I came out of the writing changed: more fierce, more unapologetic, more likely to call out sexism and inequality when I see it.

I hope you love it, and I hope it speaks to you.