Tanya Shadrick: 'Begin by making a list of what you love. It is transformative'

The Cure for Sleep relates how the author made huge changes to her life after coming close to death following childbirth

Tanya Shadrick, author of The Cure For Sleep.

In her famous essay, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf wrote about how a woman needed a space free of interruptions in order to have the freedom to create. It is a particularly fitting pronouncement for author Tanya Shadrick, who lives in the English town of Lewes, not far from Monk’s House, Woolf’s former home on the Sussex Downs; Shadrick also spent time as a writer-in-residence in the gardens there.

 When it came to completing her first book, The Cure for Sleep, Shadrick needed not only her own room, but someone to take on some of the other domestic responsibilities which can thwart creative endeavour.