Kate Pullinger on her novel The Mistress of Nothing
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Kate Pullinger is a novelist who also writes for film and various digital platforms. Born in Cranbrook British Columbia she went to high school on Vancouver Island,\\xa0dropped out of McGill University, worked for a year in a copper mine in the Yukon, traveled, and eventually settled in London.\\xa0Pullinger has written two short story collections; her novels include When the Monster Dies (1989), Where Does Kissing End? (1992), A Little Stranger and most recently The Mistress of Nothing which has just won Canada\\u2019s GG Literary Award for best English Fiction (to be awarded this evening).
She has lectured and taught at, among other institutions: the Battersea Arts Centre, the University of Reading, and Cambridge University, as well as in various prisons. She currently teaches Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University, Leicester.
The Mistress of Nothing (2009), takes its inspiration from the life of Lucie, Lady Duff Gordon, and is set in nineteenth-century Egypt. I met with Kate in Ottawa. Among other things we talk about what it\\u2019s like to win the GG, class structures, and the future of the book (check out her website here).
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