Hull author Val Wood 'struggled to write' in lockdown

Val Wood met readers at the launch of her latest book, Children of Fortune

Author Val Wood has spoken about how the coronavirus pandemic influenced her work, saying fear and anxiety "stifled her imagination".

Mrs Wood, from Beverley, has written 27 historical romance novels, all set in and around Hull and the East Riding.

She said she started writing several books over lockdown but abandoned them, as they "just weren't working".

"I stayed at home, apart from to walk. There was that fear, I thought if I catch it I might die," she said.

"It was a worry whether or not my daughters would catch it, or my grandson.

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"I think it was stifling my imagination, but once I had started the [new] book, I was all right again, I could get rid of those fears and anxieties and lose myself in the book.

"You enter another world altogether. When life has not been very kind, I can go into my own world and find comfort elsewhere."

Mrs Wood, who was called "Hull's answer to Catherine Cookson" by BBC Radio 4, said she put all her thoughts down into a book through her characters.

"My writing has been slow this year, for the same reason. It's exhaustion sometimes, it is quite exhausting, writing every day."

Her novels are mostly set in the area around Holderness, and she says having been born in Castleford, West Yorkshire, and moving to Hull at 13, she is "a Yorkshire woman through and through."

In 2012, Hull Libraries launched the Val Wood Trail, an interactive walking route around locations mentioned in her novels, to promote tourism in Hull and East Yorkshire.