Kerry Hardie is best known in the U.S. for her poetry. With her debut novel, A Winter Marriage, fans are seeing a different side of Hardie in a complex tale filled with colorful characters.

FictionAddiction.NET's Denise Mallas talked with Kerry Hardie about her new book and what her fans can look forward to next.

How did the character of Hannie, who became so real, originate?

It's hard to say what exactly starts a novel, sometimes two or three things come together and fuse then you pick out one of those things and tell yourself that it was that. I know I was thinking of writing a novel but was very aware that I had been confined by illness for the best part of ten years, so my experience was very restricted.

One day we went for lunch with an old friend of my husband's and his much younger foreign wife. It was the back-end of Winter and they lived in an area at once remote and beautiful. She was from an intensely urban, sophisticated family and he'd met her abroad then brought her back to the house that he'd owned in Ireland for twenty years.

After lunch we went for a short walk up a country road that ran between high thorn hedges. There was nothing to see but these leafless hedges and between them the winter sky, already fading into dusk at four o'clock.

The men strode ahead and she talked. As I listened I began to understand that this landscape which I find so beautiful was for her depressing to the point of despair.

She told me things that you'd never tell someone you've only just met - things that if I'd repeated them could have ended her marriage. I suddenly realized that she was too desperate to care.

About three months later we heard that she'd left. I don't think it was only the landscape and the climate that she found unbearable, I think the assumptions by which she lived were too different from those of the society in which she found herself. She was isolated and lonely and it made her angry and judgmental. We, in turn, judged her.

In bringing Hannie Bennet to Ireland I wanted to introduce a woman who did not share the conditioning of the society in which she was to live. Thus her very presence would force the other characters to become more self-conscious and self-aware. So much of what we do we think is done for moral reasons, but often our actions merely reflect what we have learned is acceptable in our society.

I didn't want to make Hannie urban and sophisticated - I don't come from such a background myself so I only partially understand its assumptions - I wanted to make her an elemental force that came out of nowhere, like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. That was how she began and once she'd begun she just did what she wanted, I couldn't stop her.

Did you find it difficult to keep the strong personality of Joss from taking over the story?

I had a lot of trouble developing Joss to begin with. I saw him - or rather a female version of him - when I was away on holiday, and I watched this girl and her mother for days but we never spoke. Then I came home with my head full of her weird, aloof presence and it took me quite a long time to translate that image into a real character.

At first I read a lot of material about delinquent and alienated young people, then I had to leave all that acquired stuff behind and feel inside me for a voice for Joss. It wasn't so much difficult to stop Joss taking over the story, as difficult to get rid of Joss' voice inside my head when I'd finished the book. It did fade, and I was glad to lose it, though in the end I was deeply sorry for him.