Susan Wicks is one of our Kent Writing treasures, as those lucky enough to have studied or worked with her, or who have enjoyed her writing, will agree. Born and still living in Kent, the list of her publications goes on and on, and includes poetry, short stories, translations and novels – House of Tongues, Bloodaxe, Cold Spring in Winter/Valérie Rouzeau, Arc, Roll Up for the Arabian Derby, bluechrome, De-iced, Bloodaxe, Night Toad: New and Selected Poems, Bloodaxe, Little Thing, Faber and Faber, The Key, Faber and Faber, The Clever Daughter, Faber and Faber, Driving My Father, Faber and Faber, Open Diagnosis, Faber and Faber, Singing Underwater, Faber and Faber.

Heck, it’s almost as long as her list of awards (she’ll HATE me doing this, by the way. Sue’s famously modest…) BUT look – 2010 Weidenfeld Translation Prize, Cold Spring in Winter/Valérie Rouzeau, shortlist 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize (Canada), Cold Spring in Winter/Valérie Rouzeau, shortlist 1996 T. S. Eliot Prize, The Clever Daughter, shortlist 1996 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year), The Clever Daughter, shortlist 1992 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize, Singing Underwater.

However, hurrah, Sue’s got a new book out. A novel, published by the mighty Salt called A PLACE TO STOP which consists of entwined stories exploring the meaning of boundaries, both real and imagined. David Constantine says this about it: “The stories in the novel intersect and reflect on one another. Nothing is fixed, these are lives still being lived by people in a sensuously present locality which, like dreamers, they go beyond.”

Plus it’s the bookclub choice at the White Review which seems like another good recommendation.

Here are Susan’s five sentences. I found them surprising and rather beautiful. I hope you enjoy too, and go and seek out more of her work.

When I was small, I wanted to be a plate designer. I thought I could live in a caravan and paint beautiful plates and people would come to visit me and buy them and I’d have enough money to live on. (This was when I was about six.)

I may not say it aloud but that’s almost certainly because it isn’t worth saying.

I tend to whoop inwardly quite often, about many things. I whoop about travel – flying and boat trips, particularly – and about scenery, and about finally managing to cut loose alone somewhere new. I whoop inwardly when I feel life is changing. I whoop about my friends’ and relatives’ achievements. I sometimes whoop at my own – but mostly I find I just move the goalposts!

Something that never fails to give me inspiration is true solitude – and a good breakfast! Mental space, and rich fuel. I believe the mind left to itself will start to play – to imagine things, to doodle. You only have to give it the space it needs and it will do its thing. I actually think even boredom can be quite helpful: if you’re a bit bored by your life you’re compelled to invent something on paper to make it more interesting.

My five favourite words are … Oh dear. This may be odd for a poet, but I don’t think I have favourite words. I’m not sure I can really isolate words from what they denote and suggest. I’d have to choose something in a foreign language, something I only half understood. Otherwise I’d slip straight through it into a picture or a thing, an action, a sensation…

Valérie Rouzeau, a French poet I’ve translated, makes up words in her poems – words like ‘désespérir’, which doesn’t exist and is a mixture of the two words for ‘despair’ and ‘perish’ – I’ve translated it as ‘desperish’. When she urges, ‘not desperish’, I think she’s packing about as much into a word as anyone can. Her new poetry collection, just published in France, is called ‘Vrouz’ – a new word made from her own name. If I had to be a collector of words rather than a collector of images I think those are the kind of words I might choose.

And lastly, I asked Susan what books she’d been reading recently:

It may be just coincidence that I’ve been reading books about France over the past few weeks, between correcting the proofs of A Place to Stop and seeing the first copies arrive… I just read Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française, and felt enriched by the experience of reading that unfinished novel with the author’s notes and projections for the unwritten third section of the book, as well as the correspondence between her and her editor and letters exchanged among her publisher, family and friends after her death. Perhaps by coincidence too, I’m currently reading – on the very warm recommendation of the poet Jackie Wills – a book called The Château, by William Maxwell, set in the France of a just four or five years later (1945) and originally published in 1961. It’s wonderfully atmospheric and intelligent. I’m reading it slowly, with relish. And it’s reminding me just how perceptive and sensitive an instrument of truth fiction can be.

Thanks, Sue. And for those of us lucky enough to live near Tunbridge Wells, Sue and the young adult novelist, B R Collins, will be reading at Waterstones on the 26th March from 6pm. You will need to contact the store to reserve a ticket, apparently there will be cake!

But for now, as a thank you for coming on here, Sue, here’s a plate of proper breakfast for you…