About Nina Bawden: Nina Bawden is one of a select group to have both served as a Booker judge and made the shortlist as an author.
One good reason for writing novels based on your life is that you have something to read in old age when you've forgotten what happened.
All writers are liars. They twist events to suit themselves. They make use of their own tragedies to make a better story... They are terrible people.
The murder of my husband by the railways has altered the way I think about everything. I had always thought that the majority of people were decent and honourable. In the wake of the crash, what made me angry more than anything else was the realisati...
Children often have a much stronger concept of morality than adults.
I like stirring the pot - I think it's part of my duty, to shake people up a bit - make them look at things in a different way.
I've never found it made the slightest difference being a woman - though there is a sort of feeling that as you get older you're not so interesting.
I would hate to live in the country, unless I was living on a farm.
Margaret Thatcher was in my year, and our first-year college photograph shows us standing side by side in the back row. We were both grammar school girls on state scholarships.
I met Richard Burton, an RAF cadet on a two-term course. I would have flirted more enthusiastically if it had not been for the horrid boils on the back of his neck.
I grew up on a suburban street with lace curtains and dull neighbours, so I made up stories to tell my friend, in which they became serial killers and burglars. She told her mother, who then told mine.
Adults get more confused by social worker jargon. Unlike children, they are also less likely to see two sides of an argument, and they no longer think they can make the world a better place. That can make them rather boring, I suppose.
The train we had so confidently boarded had been speeding at almost 100 miles an hour and it had derailed. Someone, I can't remember who, showed me a newspaper photograph of the carriage we had been sitting in tilted on its side on a station platform...
I dislike the word 'victim.' I dislike being told that I 'lost' my husband - as if I had idly abandoned you by the side of the railway track like an unwanted pair of old shoes.
I am not a victim. I am an angry survivor.
People's lives are in the care of the railways when they get on a train. The railways should remember that.
But I don't write about sex for today's teenagers. Or Doc Martens boots either. I'm more interested in exploring how exactly the world is run, which doesn't really change that much from one generation to another.
There are many times when I think I would have rather died with my husband. It would have been pleasanter, simpler. But it would have been worse for the children and the family in general.
I was cleaning out the pigsty at a farm in Wales, where my mother had rented a room, when the results of my final school exam were handed to me by the postman, along with the news that I had a state scholarship to Oxford. I had waited for this letter...
I hope in my books I help children to see their strengths, and show them I have some idea of what they may occasionally be going through. Especially at tricky moments when it is easier to go back and evade things rather than go forwards and confront ...
People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.
