And I found it quite hard to give a fuck about what my peer group thought. I was really overweight and quite punky, cutting my own hair.
I started reading to escape and I realised, this is great. And it wasn’t until I went on a hellish holiday with some pals – one girl had brought One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Master and Margarita with her. So it didn’t feel like anything to do with people like me. It’s not presented as a joy, something you do for fun. Sometimes reading fiction gets presented at school as something that’s good for you, like running. I thought reading was for wholesome people who wore ironed trousers. There was quite a strict smoking ban at our school, that really put me off. I was still at school but I never really went. In 200, the year the second book in her ‘Garnethill trilogy’, Exile, is published Photo: Colin McPherson/Sygma via Getty Images I keep going back, but Paris in the ’70s was really special. The longest I’d ever lived anywhere was Paris for three years. We ended up in Bromley in London, but before that we lived in Norway and Paris and Amsterdam and Glasgow and Invergordon – all the big lights. Everywhere we went he fell out with someone, so we had to move. He got the sack a lot for being obnoxious, to be honest with you. My dad worked for North Sea oil and we moved around a lot.
When I was 16 I was living in London with my parents. In her Letter To My Younger Self, she talks about when she fell in love with reading, the joy of having children and how she wishes that she’d given up smoking sooner.
As well as novels, she writes plays and comic books and has won several prizes, including the McIlvanney Prize for The Long Drop. In her twenties, she attended Glasgow University and gained a law degree, then wrote her first novel, Garnethill, which was published in 1998. Denise Mina was born in East Kilbride, but moved a lot as a child.
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