'When I can't write I wash clothes'

THE front window looked out onto the pit head. The slag heap was around the back. Now, all of that is fields, and all that remains of colliery life is a row of miners' cottages. It is in one of these cottages that Gillian Allnutt has made her home.

"I've seen pictures of what it used to look like and it's weird looking out of the window because I can almost see the pit head, instead of what is there now," she says.

"I never imagined living in a place like Esh Winning. But I'm not surprised to find myself living in this house, and everyone I know who has come to it says 'This is right for you, it feels like your house'."

A few miles outside Durham, it is here that Gillian settled 11 years ago. It is here where she writes most of her poetry, the work that on Wednesday won her the country's biggest literary prize, the £60,000 Northern Rock Foundation Writers' Award.

The cottages house a mix of writers, artists and teachers, and former miners or the children of former miners. The combination of incomers and mining families may seem incompatible, but it seems to work. "It feels a very supportive community," Gillian says.

Her house is a simple two-up, two-down, with the front door at the rear and the bathroom in the back extension. Sparsely furnished and free from clutter, it has few of the signs of modern living, and that is just the way Gillian likes it.

"Physically, I want space. I don't want to clutter my house with anything I don't absolutely need. People say 'Oh goodness, isn't it nice and empty?', and that is what I want. I want space rather than things," she says.

Within the first 24 hours of her award being announced, much was made of her lack of television, as the sign of a hermit, an eccentric cut off from modern life. For Gillian, 56, the attention on this perceived deficiency is clearly baffling.

"I have not had a television for most of my adult life because I haven't wanted to. So many people say it is just boring now," she says. "But there are a dozen televisions in the terrace I can go and watch; I can always see television when I really want to.

"The time I really wished I had it was '89 when the Berlin Wall came down, and again for 9/11, but it is quite rare."

Perhaps more significant is the lack of a washing machine, not just as an indication of her desire not to fill her house with unnecessary clutter. It is to hand washing that she turns when the poetry won't come.

"When I can't write I wash clothes. It seems to unlock something," she says. "I can read, I can wash up, I can sweep up, I can go out to the car, but washing works better. I don't know why. I like it because it works and I don't know why. But I live on my own so I only have to do my own washing."

She has six published collections of poems; the most recent, Sojourner, appeared last year. She supplements her income with teaching - the award means she can concentrate on her writing, although she prefers to see it as a sabbatical rather than leaving teaching behind.

But there's also a touch of anxiety. Most of her poems begin in her creative writing class. Without the teaching, she will have to find another way, as well as another way of breaking the solitude of writing.

"It will enable me to focus a great deal more of my energy on my writing, but writing is given and anything that can be given can be taken away. There is always that thought that maybe I've written my last poem and maybe it won't ever come back. I could give up all my teaching and create this space for writing and it goes away.

"And although I like solitude, I also need to go about the world and spend time with people. I'm going to have to change my life quite a lot and find other ways of spending time with people, if I don't do it through teaching."

It was partly to give herself more space to write that she moved to Esh Winning, after several years living in Newcastle. She had moved to Newcastle from London with her family when she was seven, before her parents went back down south when she was 15. It was at school in Newcastle - La Sagesse convent school - that she remembers first saying she wanted to be a writer.

"It was the first year juniors, and it was a very dark afternoon, it must have been nearly four o'clock, and the teacher was waiting for the bell to go and she went round the class and said 'What are you going to do when you grow up?'.

"I said 'I'm going to be a mummy', and everybody laughed, which is why I remember it because everyone hates being laughed at, so I said 'All right, I want to be a writer'. That is the first time I remember saying that and it has never gone away since."

After university and 15 years working in London, she decided she needed to get away, and headed back to the North-East. As soon as she arrived in Newcastle, the memories of her childhood returned, but her eventual relocation to Esh Winning was not without its hiccoughs.

"For the first year, I thought 'What am I doing here?'. I had been a straight-forward, left wing extreme feminist in London, and politics was very black and white, but the first time I went to a village meeting I came out and thought 'Good heavens, I don't know anything about politics," she laughs.

Her political beliefs were forged in the idealism of being a student in the late 60s, an experience that has left her with an unshakeable desire to change the world, but maybe because she's getting older, she says, her poetry has evolved to become much more personal and spiritual. Some of the work which won her the Northern Rock award came out of, although is not about, the death of her mother last year, which left a "great crater" in her life.

But a constant theme has been the attempt to see through falsehood and deception. This, in turn, has illuminated her search for a better world. "The one thing I have always been trying to say is that the emperor has got no clothes. Look at the reality, stop lying. That was always the case and still is. It is an attempt to see through my own illusions, to find my own way of seeing it. The struggle to write the poem can often make me see, because the poem knows before I do.

"I have come very thoroughly to believe that the only way to change the world is to change yourself. It is the hardest thing, but also it is always available and it doesn't cost anything."

As well as taking a break from teaching, the money from the award will pay for a new computer - she's not anti-machine, although she admits computers terrify her - and maybe a new roof for the back extension. A bit of travelling also seems likely.

Living in Esh Winning can feel exposed, she says, when the wind rushes down the valley. But if she does leave, the likelihood is it will be for a small town: city life no longer appeals. At least now village politics isn't quite the mystery it was when she arrived.

"I only go to village meetings as and when necessary," she says. "It is mainly about planning applications, which are never straightforward. There is no right or wrong. At least I expect it to be complicated now."