Joolz Denby is the last person you would expect to be a member of the London literati.

With her tattoos, multiple piercings and unorthodox dress sense, she looks more like a rock star.

But after 20 years of writing and performing poetry on the alternative cabaret scene, she has been thrust into a new world.

The Bradford-based writer found herself the centre of attention when her novel Stone Baby won the Crime Writers Association's New Writers Award.

The publisher HarperCollins was quickest off the mark to capture her signature, and now the book is about to be unleashed, after more than a modicum of hype.

But Joolz - she continues to use just the one name as a poet even though HarperCollins insisted on her having a surname for the purposes of the novel - is taking it all in her stride.

While other first-time novelists might have spent the month before the publication of their precious debut work arranging publicity and anxiously waiting for the reaction of critics, she has been happily touring Europe with the Bradford rock band New Model Army.

Their frontman is her long-time partner Justin Sullivan and you can find Joolz at most of their gigs selling T-shirts.

"When I told them I was going off on tour they just said, 'You can't do that,' but I told them I could and I was going to do just that," she said.

"I'm not going to miss an Army tour. Where do they think I get my material from?"

Joolz delights in confounding the expectations which the publishing industry now has of her. But she seems to do so for the right reasons rather than out of sheer contrariness.

"The minute you have any success what they ask is, 'Why are you still living in Bradford?' To them, everything revolves around London," she said.

"With all the arts things, they all want to be together because they want to make sure they don't make a mistake. The arts world is entirely about knowing the right people."

Joolz has no intention of ever moving to London for the sake of her career. She loves being in Bradford and was proud to set Stone Baby in the city.

"One of the great things about Bradford is the fact that it's stone-built so you get a reflected light from the stone," she said.

"The light is wonderful and because it's in a bowl you get these huge cinematic cloudscapes rolling in. If you go uphill out of Bradford it almost looks like a seaside town when you look behind you."

Her words echo those of Lily Carlson, the narrator of Stone Baby. She becomes the friend and manager of a up-and-coming comedienne called Jamie Gee who is based in Bradford.

"One of the things that I wanted to get across without being preachy is that Bradford is very physically beautiful," said Joolz.

She gestures from where we are sitting in one of her favourite spots - Starbucks in the Wool Exchange - at the buildings all around, despairing at the way in which Bradford is often portrayed in the wider media.

"That dramatisation of the Ripper actually made me shout at the television, and with things like Band of Gold, it's just so lazy and sloppy and stereotypical and patronising," she said.

"I don't romanticise Bradford. I don't think it's perfect. But on a lovely day the sun on the sandstone turns it to amber and you have these huge Gothic structures literally turned into amber.

"You also see these huge skies. When I went to live in London once the reason we couldn't stay was because we couldn't see the sky."

Much of Stone Baby is, indeed, upbeat. And Joolz herself describes it as a novel about love, despite its dark themes.

Jamie's career is burgeoning and her and Lily enjoy an indulgent and bohemian life in a house which they share with an Asian transvestite. But Jamie has a weakness for a certain kind of man, and when she falls for the sinister Sean Powers their existence is turned upside down.

Much of the book will be recognisable as Bradford to people who live here, although its characters live at the fringes of society and not everyone who reads Stone Baby will necessarily feel they inhabit the same world as Jamie and Lily.

"My father is reading it at the moment and he said it was like some anthropological documentary on television about a tribal society that he knew nothing about," said Joolz.

"He had no idea that people lived like that because it's alien to his generation."

But Stone Baby does ring true to life and that is surprising when you realise that some of the scenes in it are based on Joolz's actual experiences.

It is no coincidence that there is a striking physical contrast between the tall Jamie and short Lily.

The scene in which the two characters meet for the first time while cowering in the toilets to hide from the communal singing part of a show they are supposed to be taking part in is exactly how the tall Joolz first met her short comedienne friend Sandy Toksvig.

Joolz is now working on her second novel, to be called Corazon, which also promises to be hard-hitting. In it, the main female character becomes mixed up in a religious cult in Spain.

Simon Ashberry

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