Sligo-based author Kate Winter has published her debut novel, The Happy Ever Afterlife of Rosie Potter (RIP) - an everyday tale of a young woman who wakes up dead. Alan Corr talks to Kate about literary snobbery and growing up as the daughter of a spy
You could say Sligo-based author Kate Winter didn't wish to be confined by genre conventions with her debut novel.
She describes The Happy Ever Afterlife of Rosie Potter (RIP) as a "romantic, supernatural, Irish, black-comedy whodunnit". A cross pollination of themes that may have been born of her own very colourful life, one that's involved a father who worked as a spy and a childhood travelling all over southern Europe and Morocco in a coal van converted into a camper van.
And, of course, a spot of vampire cabaret in a pink gothic castle in Australia.
35-year old Winter self-published the tale of Rosie Potter, an ordinary girl who wakes up dead one fine morning, online in 2013 but after much love on social media and elsewhere, prestigious English publisher Little Brown came calling and the book was published in paperback for the first time last week.
The budding author also been approached by a publishing house in Sweden who've also fallen for her sideways take on the chick-lit genre.
"It is marketed as chick-lit because that is easer and it's been a long process to get a publishing deal," Winter tells TEN on the phone from her home in Sligo Town. "Actually, when I first approached literary agents, they found it difficult because it was such a blend of genres. It's marketed as chick lit but it's kind of accessible to everybody."
Out now in paperback
The Happy Ever Afterlife of Rosie Potter (RIP) is a page-turning romance but if this is chick lit, it's chick lit with its tongue rammed firmly in cheek. "I love chick lit but chick lit is a misnomer," Winter says. "What it really means is commercial fiction aimed at women with elements of romance and often comedy.
"But there is an awful lot of commercial fiction which is really by amazing male authors and they don't get labelled as chick lit. Chick lit is a broad term and it is an amazingly useful marketing tool. If people are not literary snobs, they'll see that this is something they can enjoy."
Winter wrote the book when she was "skint and unemployed" in 2010, a similar situation to JK Rowling when she sat down at her kitchen table to start her little story about a boy wizard.
Kate's literary influences go back a long way. She grew up in a house with no TV and where books were everywhere. Her father was a writer and for the young Kate, writing was always a potential career.
And it is her father, Gordon Winter, who could be the great mystery of her life. Now in his mid-eighties, he has had a very colourful and chequered career, including a prison term for burglary, involvement with arms smuggling, more gainful employment as a crime reporter, and working as a spy for the South African secret service in the early sixties.
Kate with her brother Guy and father, Gordon, in Corfu
After he became a deeply unpopular man in certain quarters when he published Inside B.O.S.S.: South Africa's Secret Police, in 1981. Gordon moved his family to Ireland to start a new life in Sligo. Kate was born there in 1980 but she also spent a large part of her childhood travelling around Europe in a camper van with her parents.
However, since then she has had little or no contact with her father and only met him for the first time in two decades in London last year.
"That meeting was a very clear decision on my part," she says. "He's in his mid-eighties now and I had some contact with him in my early twenties but I hadn't seen him in 20 years so I went over and we had lunch and it was very interesting.
"He was the same interesting character he always was but yeah, he has got a colourful past. It's very interesting for me now because nobody has an awareness of his actual history.
"There would be some people in the small town I live in who might have known when he lived here that he had this illustrious, mad spy background but not many people around here know. Now at least once a week I get an e mail or a tweet from someone random investigative journalist asking me if I'm Gordon Winter's daughter and I say, yes I am but I have nothing for you. I don't know where he is!"
Kate signs copies of her book at the launch in Sligo last week. Credit: Colin Gillen Photography
Before trying her hand at fiction writing, Winter also dabbled in journalism, PR and theatre and then there was her spell as a "cabaret vampire'' on Australia's Gold Coast. The job was essentially a waitressing gig in a in huge pink castle called Dracula's, which involved singing, dancing and insulting the customers - all while dressed as a bloodsucker with a fright wig.
Could be the makings of her next book but right now, the tale of the very funny but very dead MIss Rosie Potter sounds like something that could be ripe to be made into a kooky Hollywood rom com.
Has it crossed Kate's mind? "Oh absolutely! I wrote the book with no idea or expectations at all of getting a publishing deal. I wrote it for pure pleasure and I think that's why it's hitting such a funny bone with people because it's really light hearted and it doesn't take itself seriously at all.
"In terms of a film, I think the key thing is that Rosie Potter has an incredibly linear narrative. For a novel, it really romps along. It flies along and you could actually read it in a matter of hours and for me I think it's actually a fully-formed movie.
"But I never deluded myself by thinking I'd get a publishing deal - which I have and I'm overjoyed - but in my head I always allowed myself to dream."
The Happy Ever Afterlife of Rosie Potter (RIP) is published by Little Brown.
