Penelope Mitchell

I remember being this little girl missing her daddy and living so far away in France and from anything that was familiar to me. I felt so different and so isolated. When you're removed from everything that's familiar, you realize who you are.

The thrill of a photo-realist painter is if you get really close to the painting, it looks just like a photograph. Whereas in my case, if you get close to my paintings, they totally fall apart - so I'm about as far from a photo-realist as it gets.

At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens.