10mh caught up with author Emma Morgan to talk about her second novel, Beggars Would Ride, recently published by Northodox Press in 2025. Beggars Would Ride is a contemporary LGBTQ love story about two young women who meet at an open-mike poetry night in Liverpool. Nat is a working-class Scouser with a difficult family history and an estranged sister. She is making a decent living doing something she doesn’t mind doing but her life is stale. Gwen is an idealistic middle-class primary school teacher from Somerset who has recently moved to the city. They begin an affair.
10mh: When did you first get the idea for the book?
I am influenced, against my own better judgement, by the eighties’ teen films of John Hughes. I first saw ‘Pretty in Pink’ at fifteen and the story has stayed with me ever since. I’m still fascinated by the interactions of people who come from opposite worlds but made queer because there were never any openly queer characters in those films. This book is my delayed response to that: a world in which being a lesbian is no issue at all to either the characters themselves or to anyone in their orbit. Of course, I am aware that this is absolutely not the case for most queer people, but I liked working with the idea that nobody bats an eyelid. It’s a love story – simple as that.
I’ve tried to write something that isn’t set in some fanciful pastel coloured romance world but in one that’s a bit grittier, more like the one you might get in a crime novel. But I’m not writing social realism, so everything is done through my own prism. A queer crime influenced Liverpudlian skewed spin on ‘Pretty in Pink’ about sums it up.
I think that the other seed of this book dates from back in my twenties when I was going through a really difficult time and I met a sex worker who seemed to be going through an even worse one. We spoke to each other in the international language of women’s shoes and had a conversation that for me at least was very eye-opening. Then we went our separate ways, and I never saw her again. I have often thought about her though and wondered what happened to her. She gave me some very good advice. We made an instant connection, and I like to think that in a different life we might have been friends. She also told me that she had a brother, and I wondered what her brother might be like. Can people with very different characters and from very different backgrounds make a life together, despite the odds? Can they even be friends, let alone be in a relationship? Those are the questions I posed myself.
10mh: Do you have a best time of day to write?
I’m a morning person and it’s best if I start off writing sooner rather than later. I think the fact that I’m not fully awake helps because my perfectionist side has yet to kick in and so I get to override it and enjoy myself. I love writing and have learnt from experience that even when it’s not going well there is often some bit that is worth coming back to another day. If I’m stuck, I read back over what I’ve already written, or I start a completely different chapter. When I first started writing I thought you had to be linear, but you don’t; I bounce around between chapters and characters. I also write a lot of drafts and do a lot of editing. It’s not efficient and it probably takes far longer than it should, but I have come to embrace this process as my own. I think you need to find what works for you and stick to it rather than following anyone else’s prescription. I’m not good at routine in my writing, not even a self-imposed one.
10mh: Where do you write?
I write novels on a laptop at my desk. I accidently used a red Sharpie to write on a piece of paper once and it bled, so that the words ‘Beggars Would Ride’ now seems to be indelibly printed onto the desk in capitals which makes me smile. I write short stories and poems in notebooks and that can happen wherever. But for a novel I need to be able to cut and paste or I confuse myself. In front of me I have painted a tree on the wall with quotes from favourite writers in the branches. When I’m daydreaming, I sometimes doodle there. There’s something about behaving like a naughty child that must liberate my imagination.
10mh: What book are you currently reading?
I’m reading a couple of books that I’ve been sent to review which is a cool thing to be asked to do. Free books! But I often read more than one thing at a time and so I’m also reading ‘There are Rivers in the Sky,’ by Elif Shafak because my brother passed it on to me. He only really reads thrillers so I reckon it must be good to persuade him to branch out. Her prose is beautiful.
10mh: What is the best piece of advice you have been given and why is that important to you?
The best piece of advice I have about writing comes from Anne Lamott in her book ‘Bird by Bird’. Her brother was overwhelmed by a nature assignment from school and her dad told him to do it ‘bird by bird’. Rather than getting bogged down by the vast nature of a novel and panicking, I deal with the little bit I’ve got in front of me. I don’t have word counts or page counts to aim for, I just do what I can on that day and then come back to it the next.
10mh: Can you tell us three authors you would like to meet, dead or living, who would they be and why?
I’d like to meet Maggie O’Farrell because I heard her on a podcast saying that she had a stutter as a child. When she started writing she found it miraculous that she had access to such a wide range of words, rather than only using the ones that she could say easily. I had a lisp as a child and instead of ‘f’ said ‘th’. I sometimes wonder if something similar happened to me and whether this influenced my desire to write. I’d also like to meet Barbara Trapido because her novels are wonderful. I suppose she’s my writing heroine because she writes things that are funny and clever at the same time. She seems to have gone out of fashion; I’ve no idea why. I’d also like to meet Virgina Woolf because she was difficult and depressive and yet completely brilliant and original.
10mh: What are your aspirations for the year ahead?
This novel is my second and so I’m less naïve than I was first time around and understand the process better. I hope I’m less phased because when ‘A Love Story for Bewildered Girls’ came out I was pretty freaked out and didn’t really enjoy it as much as I was expecting to. It had taken me a long time to get published and so I was expecting to be swamped by waves of confidence but of course that didn’t happen. I then had to deal with what musicians refer to as the ‘difficult second album’ and that caused me a lot of false starts and frustration. The fact that I have produced something that I am proud of I count as a personal triumph. Whatever its fate is in the world I know that it’s the best version I can make of the book that was in my head. This time round, I care a little less about what others think.
10mh: Last one! Can you tell us a joke?
I can’t tell jokes at all, but my dad can. Unfortunately, the ones he tells are only really suitable for his mates and not for polite company. Sometimes I am quite shocked by them myself to be honest.
Emma Morgan’s bestselling first novel, A Love Story for Bewildered Girls was longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. She was part of WriteNow – Penguin Random House’s scheme for writers underrepresented in publishing and is the recipient of a Northern Writers’ Award for Fiction. She was born and brought up in Guernsey but now lives in Liverpool. Beggars Would Ride is available from Northodox Press.
