Rozie Kelly: Hebden Bridge author to release debut novel Kingfisher after winning NorthBound Book Award

Life as a published novelist is also about to become real. Her debut, Kingfisher, comes out at the start of April, a year after the announcement that it would be released when Kelly, now 35, won the 2024 NorthBound Book Award for emerging writers based in the North of England, offered by the partnership of New Writing North, independent publisher Saraband and the University of York.

“It’s suddenly happening all at once after not feeling like anything was happening at all for a while,” she says over the phone. “It's very exciting.”

Kingfisher follows a creative writing academic’s infatuation and relationship with his venerated colleague – ‘the poet’ – one which rocks his sense of sexuality as he finds himself attracted to an older woman while he is part of a same-sex couple. The novel explores his life with partner Michael, the hostility between the narrator and his mother, Hetty, the long shadow of his late father’s death and the complicated, funny kinship with friend Jessica.

Kelly says: "I just got this voice in my head, really, which is the protagonist's voice. He's actually very sensitive and probably not that confident at all in a lot of ways, but at the time, it felt really powerful to be writing somebody who didn't second guess themselves and just sort of went for things. He's quite arrogant and he's quite a difficult person, and I loved writing that. I just thought, ‘Oh, this is great. I'm going to see what happens with this’.”

Eight months on she had a manuscript exploring sexuality, power dynamics, bereavement and the nature of love, but one which also subverted the typical coupling of older men with younger women, as the narrator, a man in his 30s, longs for the poet, who is in her early 50s.

“I'm really interested in desire, in all kinds of desire, but I wanted to know what would happen if… I wanted to objectify an older woman,” says Kelly, bluntly, “and I wanted there to be a certain type of physical desire there that I was really interested in – but I wasn't really interested in what that would look like from a straight man, I suppose, honestly.”

She qualifies the “objectify” statement by adding that her narrator’s attraction was “not a shallow desire”.

And her poet, actually, is not so aged. “I think there's something interesting happening at the moment where it's suddenly dawning on the world that women in their 50s aren't old, as if that's like brand new information. We have this idea about what makes women desirable and so much of it is connected to youth. In the real world, I don't think it's really like that, I don't think that's how desire functions, but I suppose I just wanted to have a look at that and see what would happen with those power dynamics where you've got the alternate to the story we’re used to seeing - the successful older man and the younger, pretty woman. I wanted to see what it would look like if it was a younger, pretty man and an older, successful woman.”

Grief also seems omnipresent in the book, but Kelly – despite having written a novel in which the narrator is coming to terms with the illness or deaths of various people – didn’t even realise that’s what it was about until her friend Java Bere pointed it out.

“Entirely lacking self awareness,” she laughs. “But I also sort of wonder whether that was a little bit of a self-protective thing going on. I must have started it around just before a year after my dad had died.”

Bill Kelly died aged 77 in April 2020. Although she doesn’t think she grieved in life the way her characters do in her fiction, Kelly’s sensory experiences of that time made their way into a passage of the book. “I was really picturing watching my dad die and what his body was doing, so I think it was quite true to it in that sense.”

However, there was something “calming” about having that on the page.

“One of the things that's funny about grief is that when you're in the beginning part, it just feels impossible and huge and you can't get away from it, and you're desperate to get away from it. But actually when there's a bit of space between you and the loss itself, you don't want to lose any of that stuff, like even the hard stuff, because gradually life keeps going, and you're sort of moving further and further away from the people that you've lost. So, if anything, I have quite warm feelings about that element of it now because anything that makes me feel connected to my dad and to the other people that I lost in that period, it's not bad – even if it doesn't feel nice, it's still connection.”

Kelly is originally from the Midlands and, after spending a long time as a mixology bartender, travelling and living in locations such as Portugal and New York, at around 25 she got an “itchy brain,” she says. She studied for an undergraduate degree in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Warwick and went on to a creative writing Masters in Manchester, and moved to Hebden Bridge when friends introduced her to its charms. She now works for Arvon, which offers creative writing courses, and whose Lumb Bank site, currently under redevelopment, is an 18th-century millowner’s house which once belonged to Mytholmroyd-born late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes.

Indeed, the literary community of Hebden Bridge is quite a benefit of being there. “Living where lots of other writers live is actually quite a validating experience. There are writers whose work I read during my undergrad who I’ll bump into in Co-op. It makes it feel a lot more possible, like… ‘oh, this is something you can make your life’” says Kelly. “Because (writing) is quite solitary and the industry can feel quite impenetrable, it can feel like that's not possible sometimes.”​​​​​​​

Just a couple of months to go until it’s all very real.

Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly, published by Saraband, is out on April 3. ISBN: 9781916812352.​​​​​​​