Author Katie Collom: 'I was drawn to Yorkshire as birthplace of the Brontës'
Katie Collom needed little more than two words to persuade her to consider Yorkshire as her next home - The Brontës. "A friend who is from the area was really selling Yorkshire and she sold it to me on the basis of the Brontë sisters being from here,” Katie says. “I was like oh okay, if it’s got a literary angle, I’m in.”
She’s no stranger to shifting her roots. After a childhood in Mexico, Katie moved to Cuba to do ballet training before completing a degree at university in the US and then moving to Singapore, and later London. For many years, she was a ballet teacher, but she’s since transitioned into freelance writing and now Katie has released her debut novel.
Titled Peter Miles Has to Die, the book focuses on female rage, justice and survival and explores how society treats angry women, both in fiction, and in life.
“I feel like for most of my life I've heard these stories of women victimised by men in positions of power or positions of trust,” says Katie, who lives in York with her husband and three cats. “And I've just always found it really disturbing like the level of entitlement the perpetrators often have.
"They have a sort of entitlement towards life to be able to continue to live their lives and do these really mundane things like go get coffee, put gas in their car, you know, just all the normal life things.
"This question popped into my mind of what would I do if something terrible happened to someone I loved and I had to encounter the person who did it in my daily life."
From there, the idea for one of her characters, Dylan Darcy, was born. In the story, she runs into a man who is responsible for her best friend’s murder and finds herself banding together with two other women to seek some form of justice.
While writing the book, Katie drew on her personal experiences with anger and emotional suppression, but also conducted research into how female rage has been historically portrayed and policed.
"I think a lot of times physical acts of anger are stereotyped to be very male and it's almost like women aren't permitted to show anger in physical ways,” Katie says. “So, one of the things I wanted to do was explore what happens when women do terrible acts of violence as well.”
"I do think fiction is a very safe space specifically for women to explore their feelings of anger,” she adds. “Because I think a lot of times in the real world when women exhibit anger, it can put them in more danger in some situations. So I think, as women, we often feel like we always have to be nice, we always have to go out of our way to not rock the boat.”
Katie, who is now working on her second book, hopes that by reading her tale, people will explore their own feelings of anger and fear. “I hope that it feels kind of like a cathartic experience to read it for some people, because I did feel it was somewhat cathartic to write.”
Peter Miles Has to Die, by Katie Collom, is published by Penguin and out now.