Edinburgh author Stef Penney, who won the Costa First Novel Award this week for her Canada-set historical tome The Tenderness of Wolves (published here by Penguin Canada), is interviewed on Scotsman.com, and it doesn’t go well. Only a few paragraphs in, interviewer Jackie McGlone describes Penney as “a passive-aggressive clam.”

With some cause, perhaps: Penney is prickly about fairly innocuous personal questions, and she charmingly manages to see the downside of the Costa situation (“it means that people want bits of me now and I’m not prepared to give them”). She also throws out some mixed messages, touching on her agoraphobia and discussing her history of panic attacks in some detail, but also saying, “To be honest, I couldn’t care less about publicity and I’m certainly not going down that my-life’s-a-misery route.”

Still, isn’t it refreshing to see an author whose media interactions are a little more raw and a little less careful and polite?

(Oh, and the piece also touches on the Canuck connection. “When her novel was sold in Canada earlier this year, they refused to believe that she was not one of them, although the closest she has been to a frozen wilderness was on desolate holidays in the Highlands as a child, when she recalls miserably trudging through mud.”)