Popular Galloway author Karen Campbell launches the paperback of her recent contemporary fiction, Rise, in Dumfries this month.
Rise is Karen’s sixth novel in a list of impressive, critically acclaimed works and has been received to high acclaim.
Described as “engrossing, entertaining and thoroughly readable”, the novel tackles contemporary questions of nationhood and identity through the issue of Scottish Independence and the debates surrounding sustainable energy. It is an important and powerful story of living in the modern world.
Karen is a graduate of Glasgow University’s renowned Creative Writing Masters and author of The Twilight Time, After the Fire, Shadowplay, Proof of Life and, most recently, This Is Where I Am, which was a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime and has so far sold more than 20,000 copies since March 2013.
A former police officer, and council PR, Karen won the Best New Scottish Writer Award in 2009.
Karen said: “In Rise, I was keen to capture the sense of energy and self-examination that was building up during the run-up to our Independence Referendum, the feeling that a wave was building, building, and we were all being carried along in it – whether we liked it or not – but, like any wave, there would be a point where it crashed and the shoreline, the boundaries we’d known might be changed and blurred.
“What was particularly interesting for me was that I’d set the story in a small, rural community instead of the cities I’d normally write about and this coincided with me having moved from Glasgow to Galloway, so it was really interesting to take my experiences of leaving the familiar behind.
“Who knew that the thick dark silence of the countryside can feel claustrophobic if you’ve never experienced it before? One of the things that my character Justine, who is fleeing a lot of things she wants to forget in Glasgow, realises is that you can actually be much more anonymous in a big city than in a wee village.
“So, maybe moving away to the country to escape your worries is not so easy after all – especially if the problem is not the place you’re in, but the predicament. After all, as the book says, you bring your shadow with you.”
Karen will be in Waterstones, High Street, Dumfries, on Tuesday, 12 April, at 6.30pm when she will read from her novel and answer questions from Dumfries and Galloway author and journalist Sara Bain.
The event is free and everyone is welcome.
