THE Peak District provided a brooding, verdant backdrop to Edward Hogan's childhood, so it's perhaps not surprising that his first novel Blackmoor should be set in a former mining village deep in the wilds of North Derbyshire.

New writers are frequently advised to stick to what they know and in doing so Hogan is following a well-trodden literary path.

DH Lawrence, for instance, grew up in a Nottinghamshire mining community and repeatedly returned to the land he called "the country of my heart" as a setting for his fiction. But while Hogan wouldn't claim to be in the same league as Lawrence, Blackmoor is ambitious in both substance and style.

The novel starts when the protagonist, Vincent, is in his teens and chronicles the uneasy relationship with his father and his subsequent attempt to unravel the secrets surrounding his dead mother, Beth, and the former pit village where she lived.

Ostensibly Blackmoor is about the destruction of an old mining community, but it also examines prejudice and the difficulty of breaking free from the shackles of the past.

"I wanted to explore the idea of community and how they can be a good thing, but also how sometimes they count against people," he says.

"I didn't always have a great time," he admits. "I was a bit of an outsider, so I started off looking at why some people aren't accepted into a community and the history behind the mining communities."

Although Hogan draws on his own experiences, he claims it's not an autobiographical novel. "I suppose it can be difficult to separate. People say, 'Are you Vincent?' and I say, 'I'm not, but we do have some things in common.'"

As a teenager he wrote short stories, poems and screenplays but never thought about it as a possible career to begin with.

"I was the kid who didn't get taken to the cinema, so I would stay at home and read books, and writing was just something I always did. But I didn't come from a background where everyone was sitting around reading and writing novels."

It was football that seemed a more likely career when Hogan was younger. His father, Eddie Hogan, was in the Derby County youth team during the early '70s and when he joined Derby boys, he looked set to follow in his dad's footsteps.

But even then it was writing that most interested him. He remembers one tour of Germany in particular.

"I spent most of the time on the subs bench but I won the diary competition. Each of the players was asked to write about their experience and most of them weren't interested, but I filled about four journals."

By the time he finished university, he was determined to be a writer and toyed with the idea of becoming a journalist, before embarking on a creative writing course. "For a couple of years I worked in some terrible jobs to save up enough money. I was a pot washer who scraped pig fat off trays in a baguette shop for a while – I did all sorts."

Hogan enrolled on the creative writing programme at University of East Anglia, founded by Malcolm Bradbury. John Fowles and Doris Lessing have lectured there, while its graduates include such luminaries as Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan. "Some people say you can't teach writing, but I disagree," says Hogan.

"It gives you an audience and you read and critique each other's work. It's easy to get self-absorbed and pretentious if you're writing on your own and I found it an invaluable experience."

However, he admits his first attempt to write Blackmoor wasn't a success.

"The first draft was about 600 pages and it was terrible. It's completely different to the final version. What kept me going was
that I loved doing it and I got lucky and found an agent and publisher
who really believed in the book."

The 28 year-old's debut has been favourably received by critics and is likely to draw comparisons with another literary whippersnapper, Ross Raisin, whose first novel God's Own Country was published earlier this year to great acclaim.

"I've not read the book yet but it's really great that this part of the country is being so well represented in new novels."

Hogan says it's been hard work getting published, but is pleased to have put down a literary marker.

"I think with any book there is some kind of struggle. It's never easy but what you hope is that it's worth the effort."

Blackmoor is published by Simon & Schuster (£11.99).