All in good time: Geraldine Quigley's long road to getting published

Geraldine Quigley’s debut novel, Music Love Drugs War, was bashed out between ten-hour shifts at a call centre

Geraldine Quigley: ‘It’s a book about a group of friends who just love each other and fall out and fight and support each other’ Pic: Pacemaker

At 54, Geraldine Quigley has just had her first book, and her first ever stab at fiction, published. She finds herself in this position thanks to an application she made to WriteNow, a mentoring scheme created by Penguin to amplify under-represented voices and bring them to bookshelves.

Quigley was selected to take part in the scheme’s training workshops and to sit down with an editor. To her shock and delight, her resulting work ...