Life is limited; we inhabit one body, one mind, and see the world through one pair of eyes. But by writing, and reading we can enter into different worlds, get inside the skins and minds of other kinds of people in different places, and in so doing, push out the boundaries of our own lives.

I began to write when I was eleven years old. I was an avid reader and consumed books at a ridiculously fast rate. One day when I was moaning in my mother's ear about having nothing to read she suggested I go and write a book of my own.

This proved to be a turning point in my life, the first step on a path to becoming an author. I though, "Why shouldn't I write a book?"

So I acquired some lined, foolscap paper, filled my fountain pen with green ink - green would be a suitable "artistic" colour for a writer I decided - and I began. From then on I only ever wanted to be a writer, specifically a novelist, and create characters and stories of my own.

The stories I have created have mostly come out of the backgrounds of my life or of people close to me. I live in Edinburgh, where I was born, but I spent the formative years of my life, from age two to eighteen, in Belfast. Those years are responsible for the Kevin and Sadie Quintet and The File on Fraulein Berg, and now for Dark Shadows, which is also set in Northern Ireland. Dark Shadows centres around two girl cousins, Jess and Laurie, who meet for the first time at a music club in Belfast at the age of fifteen. Their fathers fell out most bitterly twenty years before when Jess' father married a Catholic and became one himself. So Jess is Catholic, and Laurie Protestant, and their orbits are different. The rift between the families is total. The girls find a common bond and liking for each other and set about trying to reconcile their families, which proves to be a daunting and difficult task.

The Scottish part of my life has resulted in books such as The Freedom Machine, Hands Off Our School, Rags and Riches and the Maggie Quartet, while my husband's background of Latvia and Canada have inspired me to write Tug of War, Between Two Worlds, and Night Fires.

Many of the books touch on the theme of displacement, one way or another. Kevin and Sadie have to leave Belfast because of the troubles. They become exiles, as do the fourteen year old twins Astra and Hugo in Tug of War. They are forced to flee in the wake of the Soviet invasion into Latvia in 1944. They have to leave behind their country, their home, their livelihood, their culture; everything that they cannot carry with them and go out into the wilderness as refugees. In Between Two Worlds I follow them into Canada where they become immigrants, starting a new life without money, possessions, friends, unable even to speak the language of their new country. Night Fires, set in another Eastern European country, unnamed, tells the story of two children caught up in a revolution to overthrow the harsh regime that has ruled their country for the past fifty years.

Sometimes displacement happens in a personal way, as it does to Lizzie in Lizzie's Leaving. She uproots herself; she leaves her home to go and live with the father whom she has never seen and who is married to another woman with a young daughter of their own. Lizzie thus opens herself up to new experiences and new emotions. She makes herself vulnerable. When people are displaced from their pattern of living their lives suddenly become wide open and they have to readjust. They find themselves at a crossroad. What will they do? Which way will they go? The crossroads of change interest me very much as a writer. Adolescence is in itself a major crossroad in life, a time of change and upheaval, when one has to take decisions and form values for oneself. It is an exciting but often stressful and difficult time, for both the adolescents and their parents and, therefore, provides much thought and material for a writer.

Joan Lingard, January 2001