About Elin Marrow

Eleven years clerking for a land drainage board, then four novels about the same stretch of water.

Biography

I write about one estuary, from four sides

“You cannot write honestly about a place until you have sat through a meeting about its drainage.”

I was born in Flint in 1979 and grew up two fields back from the Dee. Before I published anything I spent eleven years as a clerk to a land drainage board — minutes, levy notices, the annual argument about who pays for the pumping station. It was the least literary job imaginable and it gave me every book I have written since.

What I learned there is that land is an argument, not a backdrop. Somebody drained it, somebody borrowed against it, somebody is now being asked to give it back to the water. The people in my novels are almost always somewhere in the middle of that sentence.

I still live within sight of the same estuary. I write in the mornings, walk the sea wall most afternoons, and keep the board minutes of four parishes in a filing cabinet that my family has stopped commenting on.

What the books are about

Different plots, three recurring arguments.

Land as obligation

Every acre in these books was made by somebody. Drainage, sea walls and embankments are inherited debts as much as assets, and the novels are usually about the generation asked to service them.

Work described exactly

Pilot boats, haulage schedules, levy rolls. I write jobs the way people who do them talk about them, which means research first and metaphor a long way second.

Staying, not leaving

The convention is that the sensitive one gets out. I am more interested in the people who stay, why they stay, and what staying costs them by the last chapter.