When I asked her where she was thinking of moving to she immediately said "abroad." But though her answers seemed to lend themselves to somewhere radically different from Glasgow, she automatically said "Berlin." Why? "I’ve been a couple of times actually.and it’s incredibly like Glasgow." You can obviously take the girl out of Glasgow but not Glasgow out of the girl.So what does Glasgow have to offer for contemporaries like her? "I think it does have lot going for it, in terms of the art and literature scene, especially at street level.I think Edinburgh has more museums and a better kept art and museum culture but in Glasgow independent museums and galleries have thrived recently, Becks Futures for example."

"As for writers, there are a lot living in Glasgow. You do feel that you are not quite working in isolation, even though in some sense you are!" It seems she’s not leading the life of a Salinger or a Pynchon but it was her ability to write so precisely about Glasgow life that led the Herald to declare that she had "pinned the Glasgow parts exactly."

Negative Space developed out of a first-person short story: "I started writing in the first person and the voice just kind of developed." But "developed" is an understatement. After finishing her first novel she went on to write another couple of short stories using that same "voice." She sought advice from her creative-writing mentor: "He said that if I thought I still had another couple of novels in me with that voice, I should run with it." Hence, Zoe is just completing the first proof of a new book, known at the moment as the ’Unfinished Zoe Strachan Project,’ as she has yet to decide a title.

Given that local celebrities Alan Warner and Irvine Welsh received only four-figure advances for their first books I was afraid that Zoe may have suffered the same fate. But not so it seems: "I got an advance from Picador for two novels," she told me. She wouldn’t give me an exact figure, but she admits the figure was five figures. Which leaves 90,000 possibilities. Incidentally, the biggest advance ever received, to date, is Stephen L. Carter who got one for a whopping $4.2 million for his book The Emperor of Ocean Park.

That aside, once she got the advance from Picador, she had the obvious impetuous to set it in Glasgow. The Orkney Islands came into the novel as: "I had been there on an archaeological dig as part of my course. I obviously went back there to research for a couple of months." And that resulted in the publication of Negative Space.