Andrea Lightfoot asked Katarina Bivald:

Has working in a bookshop influenced your own works?

Katarina Bivald I started working part time in a bookshop when I was fourteen. You would imagine that being surrounded by books from an early age would be the perfect environment to push you into finally writing your own. But I guess nothing in life is that simple. One of the things working in a bookshop did for me, was to remind me about all the quirky ways books find us. During sales, I could find a book written decades or even hundred of years ago, by writers who could never imagine the everyday life of a Swedish fourteen year old and yet managed to speak directly to me. But it also reminded me about the short life that books sometime have, how someone could have spent years working on a book, only to find it hidden away in the storeroom.

And great books - they make us wish we could write like that, but they also, I think, make us fear our own tragic effort by comparison. I think it's why so many great readers say they've always dreamt about writing a book and yet hesitates to write it. What if we give it our best effort and create something we would mock if we read it by someone else?

And make no mistake. Your first draft will be cringeworthily bad. It will contain all the mistakes you've ever found in published books and quite a lot new ones you haven't even seen before. You just have to decide that it's worth that first abject feeling of humiliation before you start editing it.

But the most important thing that working in a bookshop has taught me is to write what you like. It's impossible to tell which books will sell and which will influence what person. Sooner or later, your book will find its readers, will transform someones life the same way your own life has been continously transformed by books, and maybe, in decades to come, a new fourteen year old will find it in a pile of books on sale.

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