Prize-winning young writer’s second novel looks set for success

His first book, Blackmoor, won the Desmond Eliot Prize and was shortlisted for two others, while Hilary Mantel, who knows a thing or two about writing, has described him as “a major new talent.”

It was an impressive literary debut and one he hopes to build on with his follow-up, The Hunger Trace, which, like its predecessor, is attracting effusive reviews from critics.

As with his first novel, the Peak District provides the brooding, slightly unsettling, backdrop to The Hunger Trace. The story follows the sudden death of David Bryant, the charismatic owner of a rambling Derbyshire wildlife park, and the impact it has on his young widow, his eccentric teenage son and an old friend, a falconer who lives on the grounds. The plot thickens with the arrival of a stranger and amid unforeseen disaster and the worst floods in over a century, their loyalties are stretched to breaking point.

“I like the idea that it’s a story moulded by the landscape,” says Hogan. “I like the way it’s wild but at the same time there are these little towns and villages dotted around. It’s the kind of landscape where you can imagine people howling at the moon and yet round the corner there’s a Morrison’s supermarket. I like that juxtaposition.”

Hogan’s prose style has been likened to D H Lawrence and just as Lawrence returned time and again to the Nottinghamshire mining communities he called “the country of my heart”, so Hogan draws inspiration from the Pennine hills of North Derbyshire. “It’s the place where I grew up and to me it always had a sense of mystery and the unexplained which has never left me. When I was a child and I walked to school I didn’t have this idyllic image of pastoral England, I often thought it was the kind of place you could get murdered, or attacked, and I think that sense of unease has filtered down into my writing.”

He agrees there are similarities between his two novels. “They are similar in terms of the locale with dark woods and the River Derwent lurking in the background.

“Looking back, I regard Blackmoor as a good first effort but The Hunger Trace is definitely a move forward, it has the same sort of slightly eerie atmosphere but I feel I got the characters just right.”

Hogan is delighted by the way people have responded to his work and is grateful, too, for Mantel’s generous praise. “She has been amazing towards me, she’s really championed me and my work and to have the support of a writer of her stature, someone I really admire, has been incredible.”

However, Blackmoor’s success created a different kind of pressure. “With your first novel expectations aren’t always that high, unless there’s been a huge bidding war which there wasn’t in my case, but at the same time it’s quite nerve-wracking because you spend years working on it and suddenly it’s out there for people to read. So all you can do is write the best book you can and then you have to let go.” Hogan has just started researching his third novel, although he’s giving little away.

“I’m at that exciting stage where you start coming up with characters and think, ‘I could live with these people for a few years.’ Writing is a lonely business, so you make up your own friends.”

The Hunger Trace published by Simon & Schuster is out now, priced £12.99.