RICHARD: Felicity Katz, your latest work Whither Manhood? has been nominated for the Booker Prize.
KATZ: That's right, yes. Whither Manhood? by Felicity Katz. ISBN 978-1-78748-223-1, priced at £12.99, published by Penguin Books and available through all good stockists.
RICHARD: It tells us a great deal about your early life, in particular the difficult relationship you had with your mother.
KATZ: My mother was quite a character. She had an uncanny knack of knowing when the kettle was about to come to the boil. Remarkable woman.
RICHARD: She wasn't a happy woman, was she?
KATZ: Well, she had rather a difficult upbringing, herself. Her father was a Scottish Jew and her mother was Chinese, but ironically they were no good with money. Actually, when my father met my mother she was working as a chanteuse at an opium den in Shanghai. He went in there - I think he was looking for the British Embassy or something - and that's when he caught my mother's eye. Damn thing was glass, kept falling out all over the place. But anyway, one thing led to another and within a couple of weeks she was expecting. However, when she told my father he simply took off.
RICHARD: Did you ever find out what happened to him?
KATZ: I heard he'd succumbed to the Big 'C'.
RICHARD: Cancer?
KATZ: Jesus. He joined a convent of nuns as a gardener. The convent itself didn't know this until 57 members of the order suddenly became pregnant. It's hard to track his movements after that, but I believe he may be dead. That or he's a very jubilant 120-year-old.
RICHARD: An either-or situation, really.
KATZ: And vice-versa, yes.
RICHARD: His desertion must've hit your mother quite hard.
KATZ: Not really. This was wartime, you see. Back then, it was a case of pull your socks up. There was no place for personal trauma - that was the army's job.
RICHARD: It was your mother who started you off writing, wasn't it?
KATZ: She gave me a great deal of encouragement. From the age of five she was always getting me to write little things for her.
RICHARD: What sort of things?
KATZ: Prescriptions, mostly. Of course, I worked under a pseudonym: Dr Harrison, or some such nonsense. It was all rather fun, for a while. But then she started to beat me.
RICHARD: Beat you?
KATZ: Chess, Scrabble - you name it. My mother was a wizard. Or a witch. Depends on how you look at it. But after a while I realised I had to escape, so I stowed away on a tramp steamer bound for England.
RICHARD: Where you were accepted into Oxford at the age of-?
KATZ: Seven. Yes, it was quite a thing, I can tell you. I was actually the youngest undergraduate to have an article published in the Isis. Well, I say article: it was more of a letter, really. You know, I sometimes wonder what would've happened if Professor Mackenzie hadn't had such bad B.O. otherwise my career certainly wouldn't have taken off.
RICHARD: And you have had a remarkable career, spanning eighteen novels, four autobiographies, six poetry collections, three plays and countless newspaper articles.
KATZ: I'd like to thank God for this tremendous gift I've been bestowed, but I can't. It's all me, really.
RICHARD: And your mother?
KATZ: No, just me.
RICHARD: I mean, do you keep in touch with your mother?
KATZ: Every day. She's living in Bangor at the moment. We have a running joke between us where she pretends she can't remember who I am. Great fun!
RICHARD: Before we draw this to a close, Ms Katz, I just wondered if you have any advice for the budding authors out there.
KATZ: You know, when asked questions like this, my mind drifts back to the words my mother gave me when I showed her the initial draft of my very first short story.
RICHARD: And what were they?
KATZ: I can't remember.
