When her latest novel, Helm, publishes in November, Sarah Hall will have finally, after two decades, fulfilled the terms of her very first book deal. Helm takes its title from the name of the northeasterly wind—known for its destructive power and characteristic cloud formations—that blasts through northern England’s Lake District. “This was part of my first two-book deal,” Hall says via Zoom from the study of her home in Kendal, Cumbria, in the U.K. “I promised to write a book about this wind and could never quite do it. I’d always end up writing another book to fulfill the contract. I’ve been trying to write this novel for almost 20 years.”

Helm alternates between chapters told from the wind’s perspective and those narrated by a variety of historical characters who experience the its power across centuries. “The book takes place very near where I was raised as a child, and I was always aware of this storm,” Hall says. “It’s the only wind with a name in Britain, and occurs in this one valley because of a set of circumstances that was fascinating to me growing up. It was something everyone talked about. You could see the cloud forming from the cottage where I lived, and you knew the kids from that part of the valley would be late for school.”

Hall, whose work has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and longlisted for the Orange Prize, says the novel was challenging to write. “There are so many stories about Helm, dating back millennia, basically all folklore,” she explains. “So, the novel as it has arrived has multiple stories, and the framing device is the wind itself, like a kind of punkish narrator. I didn’t know how to hold it all together, how the stories could work together since they are hundreds and hundreds of years apart, and I think what helped was climate change becoming an increasing issue. I thought, well, I am writing a fictional biography, a kind of lifespan of a wind, and that gave me a sense of shape for the novel.”

Born in 1974, the second child of a mill worker and a teacher, Hall describes her youth as feral: “abroad on the moors and swimming in the river, making up stories in my head.” She left home and the Lake District when she was 18 to study English and art history at Aberystwyth University in Wales. She then earned a graduate degree in creative writing at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where she met the man who would become her first husband, an American from the Pacific Northwest. In the late ’90s, they moved to Virginia when her husband won a scholarship to William and Lee Law School. The couple later divorced, with Hall remarrying after moving back to the U.K. Still, she says it was in America that she “really started writing.”

“I studied poetry and short stories and didn’t have a clue how to write a novel,” she says, noting that some of her poems had been published by Faber & Faber in the U.K. “I had a nice contact there. I didn’t have an agent or anything like that, so I sent them the novels, and they bought them.”

Hall’s first novel, Haweswater (2002), explored the impact of the Haweswater dam on the environment of a bucolic village in the Lake District in the 1930s. She grew up in the shadow of that dam and says that though the book was written in the U.S., it’s a story about home. “Living in America was great for getting the view of what happened—telescoping, needing space away from the story,” she adds.

Haweswater went on to win a Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2003, and Hall’s writing career was launched. Her second novel,
The Electric Michelangelo (2004), about a tattoo artist from the north of England who moves to Coney Island in the early part of the 20th century, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Four novels and three short story collections followed, all published with Faber & Faber in the U.K. and HarperCollins in the U.S.

“I was shocked,” Hall says of being recognized by the Man Booker Prize. “All of a sudden, boom! I was delighted to make the longlist, but then the shortlist was just insane. I was the only woman; there were these five big grand men and me, who was 30 years old and didn’t know anything about the writing scene.”

Hall says Helm involved a great deal of research—and because the project was so drawn out, she collected many disparate stories over the years. As an example, she cites the stone circles of Cumbria, where legend has it a coven of witches was turned to stone by a Scottish wizard. “I have always been interested in late neolithic monumental architecture and mythical folkloric love stories and wanted to incorporate them,” she explains, noting that the novel also includes anecdotes and things she just invented, making it “historically accurate and not historically accurate—but that’s fiction.”

Though Hall’s books vary significantly in terms of subject matter and setting, the author says her work does have a through line. “I suppose there has always been an environmental theme in my work, though the themes are varied from economic collapse to a fascistic British government to rewilding. A kind of ‘how do we live with our environment’ is a central preoccupation for me.”

As an author of both novels and short stories, Hall says she feels Helm occupies the territory between the two forms. “I’ve always got ideas for short stories, and I have cycles of wanting to write them,” she adds. “I think short stories are harder, but there’s something in the short form that suits my pure preoccupation. It’s nice to find the territory between the two, which is why Helm was so great with its multiple narratives. They are not short stories, but they have the toughness of short stories, so I feel like this book has in some ways made me a better writer.”

And with Helm, Hall hopes she’s recovered some of the joy and levity she had at the start of her career. “This wind seemed like a great subject for that,” she says. “This thing is an aerial demon we can’t get hold of. It’s doing whatever it wants to do. It’s changing tone. It’s depicted as a calculation, then as a monster over the hill. I love that sense of mercurial reality and I hope that comes across. My last book was about a pandemic and was pretty grim, so I’m hoping people will be a bit more entertained. Helm has some jokes for a change. I feel like it’s something new and a bit more playful.”