India, May 23 -- 1In an interview, you noted that as a 62-year-old, you thought your moment had passed. But here you are, shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction for your debut novel. Tell us what this feels like, and what it means for writers who may have given up on themselves? I didn't exactly realise it at the time, but I had given up on my creative-writing career when I was in my early thirties. I'd been writing on and off with friends in my twenties and when I got married and had children, I decided that it was time to "put away childish things" and focus on my family. I pivoted, but not completely away from writing. I set up an educational publishing company and commissioned teachers to write culturally diverse educational resources. I thought that would be fine, but the urge to write never really left me. It really wasn't until my children had grown up and left that I decided that it was now or never. So, in my mid-fifties, I doubled down on my writing, and within five years I had completed a novel and got a book deal. 2How did the voice of Mercy come to you? How challenging was it for you to sustain the curiosity and idiosyncrasy of this child through the book? The voice of Mercy has always been with me. I would like to be able to tell you how it came, but I genuinely do not know. My early life mirrors that of Mercy's and I always knew there was a story there. The difficulty I had was not knowing how to write it. I remember talking to a friend, who said that I had always seemed old, as if I had been born an adult, and that was the light-bulb moment. Although Mercy is still "technically" a child in her mother's womb, in her head, she is an adult, operating a body that just doesn't function properly yet. In a way, writing The Mercy Step was an exercise in going back and interviewing my younger self. Although Mercy is very different from me, she is who I would have been as a child, if I had had more confidence. 3You use Caribbean expressions such as "kissing the teeth", in the book. What was it like to weave in these details? It wasn't a challenge because I grew up in a household that spoke in Jamaican dialect. The difficulty was deciding how much Jamaican dialect to use. I decided to take Toni Morrison's advice and wrote my first draft in a "closed room". By which I mean I couldn't think about the reader while I was writing because I would have ended up censoring myself. I simply had to write the way I knew Mercy's family spoke, and hope that it resonated with the reader....