Author Elizabeth Gill may be known for her historical North-East sagas, but she is as far removed from Catherine Cookson as you can get, as Women's Editor Lindsay Jennings discovers

IT'S the not the kind of look I imagine for an author of 14 historical novels and 14 modern romances. Elizabeth Gill appears at the door of her Durham home looking much younger than her 53 years in a long sweeping embroidered denim skirt, pale blue sleeveless jumper and sporting a short, brown spiky haircut. Oh, and a bleached, blonde fringe.

I'd pictured the mum-of-one in a flowery high-waisted skirt with greying hair in a bun and the kind of sturdy lace-up shoes your grandmother wore to church. But thankfully she doesn't appear too offended at any pre-conceived notions, and only slightly offended when an attempt is made to draw comparisons between her work and the renowned North-East author Catherine Cookson.

"People make generalisations, but my books are nothing like that, " she says breezily, bringing in a tray of fresh coffee into the room. "I mainly write from the male point of view and about the middle classes and I write about a lot of industrial history and shipping history."

Like many authors, Elizabeth, or Liz as she is known to her friends, began writing in her childhood and fuelled her love of prose in her twenties by joining a local writing group. One of the group had had success with independent London-based publishers Robert Hale and Liz followed her friend's example.

"It was a very good place to start because I didn't have an agent and they used to take unsolicited manuscripts, " she recalls. "They used to write me letters and say 'you're almost there, but you haven't quite got this right, have you tried this?' They helped me such a lot."

Liz was also lucky enough to be living a life would-be authors dream of. She gave up her "boring" job compiling the in-house journal for Paton and Baldwins in Darlington to write full-time. She and her husband, Richard, lived the "Good Life" growing their own vegetables and residing in a rented 17th Century house in Binchester surrounded by 500 acres.

And after two failed attempts, Robert Hale finally accepted her 50,000 word third offering. It was published under her married name, Hankin, when she was 30 - the same week her daughter Katy, now 23, was born. "I used to spend all my time bashing away at this typewriter, " she cries, filling the room with infectious laughter.

"We were living in a caravan having a house built and I finally got a letter saying I'd been published. I can remember running around the fields and shouting 'I'm a writer, I'm a writer' I was so excited.

"After that I would get little cheques sent or they'd phone me and say 'Mrs Hankin we've got £50 for you from Germany'. It wasn't a fortune but they always dropped at the right time."

Liz went on to write 14 romantic novels for Robert Hale and six short historical works. She also secured the services of an agent, Judith Murdoch, who went on to get her a two-book deal with Hodder and Stoughton to produce longer historical novels. Liz, a former journalist at The Northern Echo, wrote six works for Hodder before moving to Severn House, which has just published her first modern novel, Where Curlews Cry.

"It's a book about three widows and is based around a solicitor's office in Hexham. There are lots of secrets in the story and lots of complications but essentially it's about how people cope with tragedy and how they survive, " she says.

Liz knows only too well how to survive in the aftermath of devastating circumstances. Sixteen years ago she lost her husband in a tragic boating accident on the River Ure, near Ripon, leaving her with a young daughter to bring up on her own. Fortunately she had a close family to support her and points to the example her parents gave her, which typified the stoic post-war generation.

"My parents worked hard and played hard and had this incredible ability to get on with things, " she says passionately. "I've tried to set my kid the same example. It doesn't always work but you just keep battling, and I suppose that's what their generation has given me.

"I've used an awful lot of my own experiences in my books but I also take a lot of things from other people. I think you use the emotions you went through rather than circumstances."

Liz wrote Curlews after her last historical novel was rejected by her editor and the pressure was on to find an alternative. She pulled the manuscript for it from the bottom of a drawer where it had been languishing for seven years and began to re-write.

"I just kept altering it and re-writing it and I wrote this big surprise ending, " she says. "I tend to write a bit haphazardly. Where some people will have a plot and know exactly what they're going to write, I tend to work around a theme or a character and a period. I don't like to know what's going to happen, I think it takes the spontaneity out of it. But I do do a lot of research.

"I write about complicated relationships because it's more interesting for me - what problems people have and how they resolve them. But they're not happy-ever-after sort of books, " she stresses, distancing herself again from Cookson's generally happy outcomes.

Like many authors, she also takes a pen and pad with her everywhere and can often be found scribbling in the cafe at the Durham Light Infantry museum, in restaurants or on the train. She always kicks herself, she says, if she goes somewhere and forgets her pen, preferring to write in busy environments.

"I like background noise when I write, " she laughs, pointing from her office window to the busy roundabout outside Durham's County Hall.

"It's one of the reasons I moved here six months ago, for the movement and noise. I used to live in Lanchester and had a big house with a garden but it got a bit quiet."

Liz spends between three and four hours a day writing and an average 90,000 word novel takes about a year to complete. Her preference for writing from a male perspective came partly because she found the men to be the most interesting, powerful characters when she was growing up. She also recalls admiring her father, Frank, as the boss of a steel works in charge of 60 men in Tow Law, and being surrounded by adopted uncles.

"I was a little girl growing up in the 1950s and the men always seemed to be going out and doing things. But I think I write fairly strong characters anyway, both men and women."

Liz is aware that many of her readers are men, who are often attracted to the industries she writes about, and that her name sells very well with libraries.

Nor has she ever lost touch with her core audience - most of her book launches are in libraries.

It remains to be seen whether her readers accept her new modern novel.

"I write historical novels but I don't want to be categorised, " she says.

"I think it must be awful if you feel you have to write something. I've written four different types of books and you just never know what you're going to do next, which is brilliant. It's great fun."

Where Curlews Cry by Elizabeth Gill (Severn House, £18.99)

Published: 04/10/2004