Anne Youngson biography

Interview

British author Anne Youngson worked in the car industry for many years, but she always wanted to be a writer. Meet Me at the Museum, her debut novel, fulfills that life-long dream. Written as a series of letters between an English farmer and a museum curator in Denmark, the novel sings with compassion and self-reflection. Youngson, mother of two and grandmother of three, lives in Oxfordshire, England.

You began your career as an engineer in the car industry. What led you to novel writing?

I always thought of myself as a writer; I loved the challenges of the job and the day-to-day business of working with other people, but I was always thinking of stories, and how I would describe what was going on around me, as if I was writing it down. Whenever I had time and a story I thought I could use, I would write it down, but I never considered this as something I could do for a living. It was not until I began to take courses and meet other writers and, finally, after I retired from full-time work, that I realized a novel was something I could aspire to write.

Where did Tina and Anders, the novel's main characters, come from?

It is impossible for me to say where they came from. I knew quite clearly the sort of person I imagined Tina to be, her background and attitudes. As I wrote in her voice it became more and more familiar until I could be sure I understood just what she would feel and say in any situation. At first Anders's voice was a precise and factual counterpart to Tina's, but the story of his wife changed him into someone who was also caring and compassionate, perhaps slightly ...