About Kerensa
Kerensa Warlaggan has been writing stories and poems since the age of eight. She was first inspired by her Cornish uncle, who wrote short stories and poems and shared them with her—an early invitation into language, imagination, and craft.
As an adult, she has written two novels and many poems over the years. She has also written a play that was successfully produced on stage, and she occasionally writes non-fiction in addition.
Kerensa is fascinated by people’s motivations, obsessions, life experiences, and behaviour in all their conflicting variants. These fascinations inform the themes running through her work. She writes about imperfectly formed, fully rounded characters making their way through life as best they can—often while wrestling with belonging, identity, the far-reaching impact of ethically right and wrong behaviours, and the possibility (or impossibility) of redemption. Her characters are steeped in family origins, traditions, and history, and are often trying to break free from some of these even as they’re shaped by them.
Cornwall is a county Kerensa loves deeply. It provides the backdrop—and the widely differing landscapes—in which her novels are set. She is interested in Cornish history and sometimes draws on factual elements, weaving them into her stories.
Kerensa lives in Cornwall with her long term partner and a cat.
A note from Kerensa
I write because I’m curious. I write because people are complicated. And I write because Cornwall—beautiful, haunted, stubborn Cornwall—keeps giving me stories I can’t ignore.
A few things about me
Sometimes people ask me who I am and what motivates me to write. So, here are a few things you might like to know about me:
I dislike injustice a great deal and this often underpins the stories I write. In all my novels, someone is trying to right an important wrong, usually for someone else. I am a natural advocate and this shows up in my writing very regularly.
I’m fascinated by what motivates people to do the things they do. I have a strong drive to understand humanity in all its fascinating forms, which has been life-long.
I like to hang out in quirky cafes as well as on the moor or on one of Cornwall’s iconic beaches. Sometimes I will write there, other times I just take in the view and soak myself in the sounds, smells and tastes that are all around me. I take these home with me. (It’s nice if the food and the coffee is also good!)
I have an office with a desk, but I can actually write pretty much anywhere. When the urge comes, I go with it wherever I might be. At my desk, I use a laptop, in between it will be a notebook or the notes app on my phone. Ideas come to me everywhere I go and I like to get these down so I can develop them later.
It might be a random thought, a phrase, a snippet of something I hear or the impact of a place I go to. Often, it will be the answer to a plot or character riddle that has been challenging me.
One of my favourite things is to go up on to the moor with a proper Cornish pasty to eat lunch. I watch the ponies, track the sky and rain, enjoy the starlings and jackdaws, the landscape, the cows, horses and sheep and the ever-present sparse-but-sturdy trees.
When I was fifteen, my English teacher said “well, with you poetry has always been the thing….” I knew what he meant, but I also disagreed. By the time I was twenty I was already making my first exploratory forages into novel-writing. But I have always also written poetry because it rises regularly within me, like the swell of groundwater.
The same teacher wrote “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business” when I was sixteen in my book. At the time, I didn’t really understand this, but he wrote “T. S. Eliot” underneath. So I looked up the poem, and then I got all of it. This quote has stayed with me and is intrinsically linked with how I practice the art of writing. I remind myself whenever it is needed.
My favourite season is the autumn. I love the fiesta of colours in the trees and how there’s a nip in the air that speaks of the coming cold. I also love the rain and wild winds we get here in the autumn and winter. I feel very connected to the fact that the year is once again turning. For me, it’s a time of contemplation, review and hunkering down in preparation for the winter. I get the same connected feeling when the other seasons shift, but it’s not so visual in its effects.
I don’t like to be too hot, but I also feel the cold more than average. I try to keep warm because being cold has a negative effect on my productivity. Conversely, being too hot makes me very lethargic and then I will just get a headache, which is also bad for business!
