by Tracey McCallum
Sarah Forbes Stewart – Aren’t We Lucky
As a poet, Sarah Forbes Stewart has been shortlisted for several prestigious poetry prizes – winning the 2019 Callum Macdonald Memorial Award. In addition to this, Sarah was Fiction Editor at Scholastic Children’s Books, Senior Editor at Floris Books, and has written for publications including The Guardian, Time Out and the Herald. She’s also the author of the Elspeth Hart children’s novels (as Sarah Forbes).
Sarah was born in Aberdeen and currently lives in Edinburgh, where she runs The Lighthouse Children’s Literary Consultancy.
Here we find out more about Sarah, and her deliciously dark debut novel, Aren’t We Lucky.
How did you get into writing as a career?
Like many authors, I knew I wanted to write from a young age, but I really got my start working at DC Thomson in Dundee – I saw a job ad for trainee writers / sub-editors when I was leaving school, and I went to work for them for a year back in 1997. It was great! This was so long ago that we didn’t even have computers on the features desk. We wrote stuff out longhand then sent it to a typing pool. This seems wild now. I worked with some brilliant people there and we had a lot of fun.
What’s the one thing you know now that you wish you’d known when you started out?
That rejection is a huge part of the game even for established writers. It’s good to get comfortable with that.
What made you decide to go from being a children’s author and poet to writing Aren’t We Lucky?
I’m lucky because I get to do a bit of everything. I’m still a poet – my first poetry collection, Devour Everything, is coming out in 2026, and I’m still a children’s author: my most recent kids’ book come out last year with Harper Collins, called My Granny is a Crocodile. But I’d always wanted to try my hand at writing for adults, and I felt like life was too short not to give it a whirl.
Is the process between all 3 genres very different or do you have the same writing methods regardless?
Fiction and poetry feel really different. Fiction is a bit more planned, if that makes sense, although I tend to start with a dynamic between two people or a character that I’m interested in. Poetry is sort of a strange genre: you need to really switch off the logical part of your brain for the first draft of a poem.
What are your perfect conditions for writing?
Silence, lots of coffee. I think that’s it!
Was it a culture shock growing up in Aberdeen and then moving to Edinburgh? My impression is that both cities although only 130 miles apart, are very different.
I grew up in Stonehaven, really – we moved there when I was 7. I don’t think it was a culture shock moving to Edinburgh, but perhaps it was a culture shock going from a Scottish state school to the University of Edinburgh? I spent a lot of time feeling out of my depth in the first months there.
Aren’t We Lucky centres around friendships – how do you think our friendships or our attitudes to friendship change as we go through life?
I think good friendships sort of flex as you go through different life stages. I have amazing friends that I see maybe once a year, because they live overseas; I have friends who have kids and friends who don’t; sometimes you have to acknowledge that you’re in different physical or geographical spaces, but you can still maintain closeness.
What does friendship mean to you?
My friends are hugely important to me. Like additional family!
You’ve been hugely successful already, was it daunting branching out and writing Aren’t We Lucky?
Thank you! Yes, it was! Exciting and scary in equal measure.
Do you have any say in who narrates your Audiobook? Nicola Coughlan was very good.
She is brilliant, isn’t she? Audible are so good about matching up the right narrator with the right book. I was just thrilled when they told me she had said yes!
Tell us a little about your work with The Lighthouse?
I still run The Lighthouse – a consultancy helping writers of children’s and Young Adult fiction. I really love getting to do this. It’s very varied work and such a great feeling when one of ‘my’ authors gets a book deal!
How challenging is it for Scottish writers to gain recognition?
I think it’s pretty well accepted that publishing remains very London-centric, but I’d like to think that there is at least an appetite to find stories from a wider range of voices. So many things like press interviews and podcast/radio/TV recordings can be done remotely, so that helps.
What’s been your biggest success so far?
As an author, I think having a book narrated by Nicola Coughlan feels pretty huge, so I’ll say that! But success in general – my family. My little boy. He’s my biggest achievement, even if he did smear tuna in my hair the other day.
What’s your least favourite part about being an author?
Ooh, tough question. I think I like all of it. Aside from being self-employed and having to keep a spreadsheet for end of year accounts. That’s not so fun.
Who are your favourite authors?
Donna Tartt, Hilary Mantel, Muriel Spark, Colm Tobin, Seamus Heaney, Curtis Sittenfeld … I could go on!
What’s next for you?
I’m getting my poetry collection together, then working on a new novel for adults – and hoping to take a week off over the summer! I need a swim in the sea and some sand between my toes.
Aren’t We Lucky by Sarah Forbes Stewart is available on Audible
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