An Interview with Author, LK Pang

By Sarah Morgan

It’s not everybody who can say they’ve gone from designing buildings to creating whole worlds, albeit fictional ones, but that’s what LK Pang has done.

The author started her professional life as an architect after studying at university in Sheffield, where she also got married.

“I was qualified and working as an architect, basically up until I wrote the first book,” she reveals, when we meet up in Harrogate during the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival. “I didn’t think, ‘Oh, I’ve made it big time!’ I just felt it was time to leave the industry. I felt it was hard to be creative in that world, and I needed to be creative.”

Although born in Kent and having lived in Surrey, Pang, who is more widely known as Yvonne, is now an honorary Yorkshirewoman, having spent most of her adult life in the county; she currently lives near Knaresborough with her family. “I’m fully settled,” she smiles.

So, did she always want to be a writer?

“Maybe subliminally. I’ve always written small extracts here and there, like short stories. I started writing a book that was more of a romance novel, but that didn’t really go anywhere. It wasn’t until one Christmas when I’d read a book by Karen Swann that I felt inspired to try again and do it properly.

“It became my new year’s resolution. I sort of attacked it every day, with a goal of writing 2,500 words a day; I had a first draft in about four months.”

Most authors describe themselves as either ‘pantsers’ (ie they fly by the seat of their pants with little idea of how things will pan out) or ‘planners’ (in which every last detail is meticulously organised). Yvonne reckons she’s more of the former than the latter.

“Every time I try to outline, I go off on a tangent, although that doesn’t always work either – I write myself into the abyss and can’t find a way back from that. I feel as if you just let yourself go and run with the characters, it’s so much more fun and freeing. Having said that, there does need to be some sort of structure.

“But even when I think I know the ending, I surprise myself with a twist. But I suppose, if I can’t guess how it ends, nobody else can!”

“I’m going a little further back in time”

Whatever method she adopted obviously worked, because out of it came Moat Hill Hall, published in 2023, whose inspiration was rather close to home.

“I’m a big fan of the Brontës and big, epic romances,” explains Yvonne. “So I wanted to explore the ideas in Jane Eyre in a modern setting. Being Chinese, it’s hard to really immerse yourself in that world, or even being allowed to as an ethnic minority.

“I wanted to see what would happen if a mixed race architect started to renovate a rundown stately home owned by this enigmatic man who is sort of like Mr Rochester.”

She followed it up last year with The Night Counsellor, which is set in a mental hospital during the 1950s.

“I’m not sure what inspired it,” she admits. “I was editing Moat Hill Hall when the idea of the first scene just landed. I had to write it down, but I wasn’t sure which direction it would go. It’s a very vivid scene in which a female counsellor is treating a mute patient. That sort of stark room where one of the characters can’t speak really grabbed me.

“It was then that I started to research mental hospitals, finding out how dark it was and the atrocities that went on, especially from the viewpoint of women – that really fuelled the story.”

Among the institutions she delved into is High Royds near Menston in West Yorkshire, which is now luxury apartments, having closed down in 2003. What’s been really gratifying has been the positive feedback Yvonne has received from readers with first or secondhand knowledge of such places: “They gave me some approval, I guess!”

Now she is working on a pitch for a possible movie version. “I’m not pinning my hopes and dreams on it, but it would be fantastic.”

In the meantime, she’s also thinking about her third novel.

“This one is also a gothic mystery,” she claims. “I’m going a little further back in time to the Second World War. I won’t say too much, but it is set in Yorkshire!”

Well of course. After all, we do do gothic rather well…

More info: lkpang.blog