Recently, I shared an interview with Kristina Thornton (you can read her interview here), who was a finalist in the RNA Awards 2025 with me. Today, I get to share another interview from yet another of our fabulous finalist group! Allow me to introduce you to Nicola Knight, whose latest romance novel, Washed Up, is out today!
Tell us a little about yourself. (How did you get started writing? What do you do when you’re not writing?)
My name’s Nicola and for my day job I work as Head of Communications at Redwings Horse Sanctuary, one of the largest equine welfare charities in the UK. Basically I get to write about ponies and donkeys all day long – it’s a hard life! I have a husband and young daughter and we live in South Norfolk. I have always wanted to be a novelist but I didn’t properly give it a go until I was in my 40s. I published my first novel in September 2024, a Christmas rom com called The Night Before Christmas.
What genre is your book, and what is it about?
This is my first summer romance, called Washed Up. It’s set on the tiny island of Herm in the Channel Islands, and it’s all about what happens when a mysterious stranger ends up stranded on the island during a storm. Frankie is a local who initially finds him intensely irritating and then finds she can’t live without him. When Dylan leaves to go back to his own life, a life she can’t be part of, she doesn’t know how to move on.
What or who inspired you to write this book?
As a family we’ve been travelling to Guernsey and Herm since I was young. On a recent visit it occurred to me that it’s one of the few places in the UK where you could still genuinely get stranded, desert island style, and I wondered what might happen if someone got stranded on Herm who really didn’t want to be there, and perhaps didn’t immediately appreciate the beauty of the place!
What writing advice do you have for other aspiring authors?
My best advice is the advice I was given when I told someone I’d always wanted to be author. They said, ‘What’s stopping you?’. And I thought, I don’t know. Me! I’m stopping me. I talked about wanting to be a writer and people often thought of me as a writer, but I didn’t actually do any writing.
That was compounded after my daughter was born when I kind of lost sight of myself altogether, as mums sometimes do, I think. I didn’t have anything for myself, and I’d never had many hobbies at the best of times. I’m a mediocre baker at best and positively terrible at crafts of all kinds, but I love to read and I always wanted to write. So I started a brilliant course by novelist Tim Clare called the 100 Day Writing Challenge http://www.timclarepoet.co.uk/the-100-day-writing-challenge/ and then I found a competition with Penguin Michael Joseph where you had to write the opening 1000 words of a ‘Christmas Love Story’ but I was just 24 hours off the deadline. My hastily written entry was longlisted, to my absolute astonishment, and by then I had the beginnings of a novel. I persevered and after several false starts, found a publisher. That competition entry composed in a couple of hours ended up (after a lo-oooooot of refinement!) as my debut novel.
Or, in a nutshell, my advice would be, Just Write The Damn Book.
What do you enjoy most about writing and why?
The blank page! I love it when you have an idea and you can’t get the words down fast enough, when the characters are all jostling around in your mind clamouring to get out.
I’m a ‘pantser’ which means I basically start far too early, without anywhere near enough planning, and I only have a rough idea where it goes but in any case it almost always veers off in a different direction entirely. In Washed Up there’s a bit of a love triangle and I genuinely didn’t know which way it was going to go until around the 80% mark. Which keeps the process really exciting!
List three interesting facts about yourself.
- I’ve met the Queen! At Redwings we look after the Anna Sewell House in Great Yarmouth, the birthplace of the author of Black Beauty, and in 2023 I had the great pleasure of welcoming Her Majesty Queen Camilla to visit the House. It was one of the first Royal appointments after her coronation and she was an absolute delight.
- In 2023 I was a runner up in the Daily Mail First Novel Prize with a sample of a novel called The Jukebox which has yet to see the light of day – maybe one day. I remember I got the phone call while I was in my pyjamas nursing a sick child at home – so glamourous!
- My first job was as a football reporter in Ipswich, just when Ipswich Town went up to the Premiership in the early 2000s. As a lifelong football fan it was a dream job. In fact, I was the first woman to work on the sports desk at the Ipswich Evening Star.
What is your least favourite part of the publishing/writing process, and how do you manage this?
It’s the waiting! The publishing industry is notoriously slow and there’s a great deal of waiting involved. I am really not good at waiting.
The only way I’ve found to cope is to work on something new!
What can readers who enjoy your book do to help make it successful?
Oh goodness anything they can do is much appreciated. Please preorder before publication day, or of course buy a copy once it’s out. Tell your friends. Post on your socials. And if you enjoyed it, please leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads, reviews really help authors get seen. Or if you loved it drop me a line! I love hearing from readers.
What is your next project?
It’s just being finalised with my publisher now so I can’t say too much but there are definitely more novels on the way!
Where can readers connect with you?
Find me on www.nicolaknightwrites.com, follow me on Instagram @nicolaknightwrites, or Facebook Nicola Knight – Author and on TikTok @NicolaKWrites. I do have a Substack but I must admit it needs a bit of updating!
And you can buy Washed Up here: https://geni.us/Washed-Up
About Nicola:
Nicola Knight is a former journalist and chartered public relations professional, who works in communications at Redwings Horse Sanctuary, a national animal welfare charity.
She was runner up in the Daily Mail First Novel competition in 2023 and her debut novel, The Night Before Christmas, was first published in September 2024 by Bloodhound Books. It was shortlisted for Debut of the Year at the Romantic Novel Awards run by the Romantic Novelists Association. The sequel, The Day After Christmas, is now available wherever you get your book fix.
She lives in South Norfolk with her husband, young daughter and three* ridiculous cats for whom she is the official door opener and designated spare human.
(*this number remains correct at time of going to press despite an ongoing campaign to squeeze in number four).
Shelley Wilson Author 