A Song for Ella Grey (2014) won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award 2015. Claire is in love with her best friend, Ella Grey, but Ella has fallen passionately in love with Orpheus. When tragedy strikes, Claire agrees to help Orpheus break through the gates that bar entry to the Ouseburn river to begin his descent into the dark in an attempt to bring Ella back from Death. This is Claire’s story.

MK In your reworking of the Orpheus myth in A Song for Ella Grey (2014) you locate the entrance to Hades in post-industrial Newcastle. You set most of your stories in the North-East, and often employ motifs of descent. There are plots that tumble us down a mineshaft or ask us to find the courage to cross the threshold of a dark tunnel mouth or to navigate a tidal river. What is the importance of place for your storytelling?

DA I started to do it first in a collection of stories that became Counting Stars (2000). I began deliberately to use the landscape of Tyneside and of Felling, and it was a place that was filled with memories for me. The stories were a way of dealing with some tragic instances in my own life: a couple of deaths. For the first time, I found a way to write stories that could cope with those things without just saying, “Oh, wasn’t it terrible”. It brought some kind of composure to my personal experiences to craft them into stories, and this involved deliberately using the landscape, the streets and the fields and the river and the sea. That became the imaginary geography in which all these stories could take place. I had tried to do it before. I had written about Northumberland, but once I began to use deeply personal experience, that’s when the landscape opened up again. I could see it anew as an undiscovered place that I could explore, and plunder, and search through, and find out things about myself, and also find some kind of common experience. At that point the landscape began to take on some kind of mythic character for me.