But almost every night I was there I would wake up with a hand in the small of my back pushing me out of bed, and I’d go and sleep in my sister’s room. It was a strange place to be after living in the tropics, but I loved it, not least because it was somewhere I knew would always be a constant. The first impulse I think that created it was this: I’ve moved round a lot during my life – my father used to work for the Royal Bank – I grew up in Kenya, Madagascar, Yemen and Morocco, and the one point of continuity in my life was that we used to go back to this cottage on Dartmoor, which was absolutely beautiful, very isolated, just below Hameldown, and to me it was very exotic.

PM: Where did the idea for the book come from?ĬW: I’ve always had a real love for this kind of literature. And from then on you see how she negotiates the curse and how she avoids it, or doesn’t, in fact, avoid it. So of necessity, the line just dwindles and dwindles and dwindles until we open in the first section set in 1910 which is just a father and his daughter, who live alone at Rawblood. The narratives move between 18, and the premise is that the Villarca family who live there are haunted and visited, taken, killed by a white ghostly woman who visits you if you fall in love, if you marry or if you have children. Peter Meinertzhagen: Can you tell me a little bit about your book, Rawblood?Ĭatriona Ward:It’s told in interconnecting narratives, most of them first person, of a family who live in a house on Dartmoor called Rawblood. Whilst much has moved on since we met in Oxford, this interview should at least provide some nostalgic interest. Here, I am publishing an edited transcript of that interview. I first interviewed Ward on 4th February 2016 for the Oxford Writing Circle, in the dark and now sadly gone Albion Beatnik Bookstore I even recorded a terrible quality video of the interview (thankfully Ward’s intelligence and wit is of a much higher standard). Catriona Ward is the author of two novels, Rawblood (from 2015) and Little Eve, which was published this summer.

Catriona ward rawblood