She sent the first 100 pages to publishers, and a bidding war took place between Faber, Fourth Estate and Hodder for UK rights. When she rediscovered her novel in a box in the attic in 2003 she says that she couldn't believe she had abandoned Bessy. The project ground to a halt at about 10,000 words when Harris started to write short scripts for her husband, film director Tom Shankland two films, Going Down (2000) and Bait (1999), were nominated for Bafta awards. However, Harris says that as soon as she invented the voice of the girl, Bessy started taking over and she ended up ditching the farmer and focusing on Bessy and 'Missus' - the woman who employs her as a maid. One of these short pieces was about a farmer-poet and a girl he acquires songs from. It was there that she began her first novel, structured as a set of short stories. She studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia, and then became writer-in-residence in Durham prison. By this time, I had moved back to Scotland, having decided that I wanted to be a writer.' I kept writing these stories and they were getting published in anthologies and magazines.

I had such a great time writing that story that I immediately wrote another one, about another ex-boyfriend all my early stories were about ex-boyfriends. It was about an ex-boyfriend who happened to be a transvestite. And so, just to amuse myself, I started writing a short story. She says, 'I had no TV, hardly any books, no money.

She started writing by accident while living in Portugal in the early Nineties. In 2000, she received a Writer's Award from the Arts Council of England. Her short stories have appeared in a wide variety of anthologies and magazines, and she has written several award-winning short films.

Jane Harris was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and raised in Glasgow. There is more than one author with this name in the GR database

Gillespie and I by Jane Harris