Michèle Roberts was born in 1949 in Hertfordshire. With a French Catholic mother and an English Protestant father, she grew up in both Britain and France. She enjoyed childhood summer holidays in Normandy, where her mother came from: 'I grew up with the sea inside me: those landscapes of the heart that come from childhood.'

An English honours graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, and Associate of the Library Association (University College, London), Roberts worked for a period as the British Council's Librarian for South East Asia.

Roberts began her writing career as a poet. As poetry editor of Spare Rib (1975-77) and City Limits (1981-83), she had an important influence on the development of modern British poetry. She was writer-in-residence for the London boroughs of Lambeth and Bromley from 1981 to 1984. She published two volumes of poetry, The Mirror of the Mother (1986) and Psyche and the Hurricane (1990).

Turning to fiction, Michèle Roberts soon became an acclaimed and prolific writer. She has published A Piece of the Night (1978), The Visitation (1983), The Wild Girl (1984), The Book of Mrs Noah (1987), In the Red Kitchen (1990), The Wild Girl (1991), Daughters of the House (1992), Flesh and Blood (1994) and Impossible Saints (1997). A collection of her short stories, During Mother's Absence, appeared in 1993.

Daughters of the House was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1992 and won the WH Smith Literary Award in 1993. With the £10,000 prize money, Michèle fulfilled a dream by buying a farmhouse in the Mayenne region of north-west France for herself and her husband. 'All my life I'd lived in communal and shared houses, and even though I was happily married to Jim we were living in what I felt was his house,' she explains. 'So it meant a lot to me at the age of 44 to own my first property.'

Michèle Roberts has written two plays and one short film. She has also co-authored four collections of poetry and two collections of short stories, and published three collections of poetry including All the Selves I Was, 1986-1994 (1995).

As well as teaching creative writing, hosting Nightwaves on BBC Radio 3, presenting A Good Read (Radio 4), contributing to arts programmes and Woman's Hour (Radio 4), and writing short stories for Radio 3 and Radio 4, Michèle Roberts also writes book reviews for The Times and the Independent on Sunday, and has been one of the judges for the Mind Book of the Year / Allen Lane Award since 1991.

Her novel The Looking Glass was published in May 2000, and her second solo collection of stories, The Yellow-Haired Boy, appears in 2001.

'Your Shoes'

Michèle Roberts wrote 'Your Shoes' in response to an invitation from Shelter, the organisation concerned with helping the homeless. Reflecting on the commission, she says: 'I realised I wasn't a young homeless person. I was at the age to be a young homeless person's parent.' So she began to wonder: 'If I were a mother and had a daughter and she ran away from home and left me, how would I feel?'

Where is she? Why is she gone? What is she doing? Is she dead? Roberts understands how such questions torment her narrator, frantic with worry. The first-person questioning penetrates into the mother's mind. Equally, Roberts reveals a deep appreciation of the daughter's experience of domestic conflict. At the heart of the tragedy is the poignant image of the maternal cradling of the new pair of white trainers that her daughter had rejected.

In its form the piece is typical of the short-story genre: minimal action, a restricted setting, and few characters, with a primary focus on one. Within these constraints it shows a compassionate understanding of both the distraught mother and the estranged daughter.