In a story to rival one of her own fantastical novels, salt-of-the-earth grandmother Sheila Quigley has landed a £300,000 publishing deal, with her first book due out in April. She talks to Sarah Foster.

THE phrase "you couldn't make it up" could have been invented for Sheila Quigley. From the moment I arrive outside her home in a rundown part of Houghton-le-Spring, near Sunderland, I realise it's going to be an interesting meeting. It's one of those houses you can only access by road from the back, and her back door is open (who nowadays leaves the door open?).

As I knock, I hear Sheila's throaty voice inside but no one answers, so I go round to the front. Two dogs come bounding over and Sheila's smiling face appears round the door. She was on the phone when I knocked, she explains. It looks like the start of a busy morning.

It would be hard to imagine anyone differing more from what you would expect of a successful author than Sheila. Yet, having landed a £300,000, two-novel publishing deal with the prestigious Random House company, that's exactly what she is. Hugely, spectacularly, successful.

As we sit in her living room, Sheila puffing on a cigarette, she starts to tell me just how she has managed this amazing feat. Then we are interrupted by a knock at the door. It's her neighbour's daughter, who starts talking about how she's been excluded from school as Sheila hands her some coins. It's the girl's bus fare, Sheila explains matter-of-factly when she's gone. Her mother didn't have it to give her.

Although there's obviously a strong sense of community where Sheila lives, the Sunderland Housing Group estate is earmarked for demolition. Sheila admits it's had its problems. "It was horrendous up until about four months ago," says the 56-year-old. "We had everything - drug dealers, druggies wandering the streets, drinkers, fighting all through the night - and that started about five years ago. The council just started letting anyone in. It's settled down now, though."

Considering this experience, it's easy to see why her big break came initially from a screenplay she wrote about cigarette smuggling in the North-East. "It was a comedy drama and I sent it to the agent Darley Anderson. He loved it but he said it was practically impossible to sell a screenplay by an unknown, so would I write a novel based in the North-East on gangsters and stuff?"

Having already written two "totally unpublishable" books that lay languishing in a drawer, Sheila duly began her third, centred around a down-and-out family - "worse than down-and out" - living on a fictional estate in Houghton-le-Spring, whose lives are plagued by a vengeful gangster. Isn't this a little far-fetched? "It's pure fantasy," she cheerfully admits.

Fantasy it may be, but even before the book, Run For Home, has been published, a German company has bought the translation rights. Having witnessed the original auction, in which seven rival publishers vied for her manuscript, this is no big deal to Sheila.

Like many writers, she laboured for years to get her work into print, starting with short stories and facing rejection after rejection - "I bet they regret it now," she can't resist remarking.

She'd always had an active imagination and began telling stories at the age of seven, writing them down at 11. But her introduction to literature was unconventional. "I was seven and I couldn't read a word. We all had to read around the class and it came to me and I couldn't read a word, so I just burst out crying. I went home that night and got the Sunderland Echo and I said to my mam 'What's that word?'. Within three weeks of learning about five to six words a night, I could read."

Although Sheila went on to develop a reading age far more advanced than her years, she left school at 15 without a single qualification. "I was the bad girl at school. I used to act up out of boredom," she explains.

Sheila went on to work in clothing factories and run a market stall selling fancy goods, but she never lost her writing instinct. "I think it's something you're born with. Becoming a writer was always a little flicker in my mind and as I got older, it got stronger."

She's been a member of various writers' groups but now has sufficient confidence in her abilities to do without them. "Darley says I've got to tell everyone who says I've been lucky it wasn't luck, it was talent," she quotes.

But even now, with the publishing world at her feet, it isn't all plain sailing. Sheila admits to having had a few teething troubles with the second of the gangster novels she's been commissioned to write, Bad Moon Rising. It's set on the same Houghton-le-Spring estate as the first and the action takes place around Houghton Feast, the town's annual festival. "I was finding the second one hard but then I hit page 140 and it just all came together," says Sheila. Her deadline's in eight weeks, so she's writing on and off from 2 to 11pm every day.

But have the money and long-awaited recognition gone to her head? Sheila laughs her throaty smoker's laugh. She's so warm and unaffected it's hard to imagine her ever changing, even if she became the next JK Rowling. "I've no fancy tastes. I would've stayed here if I could have but my family would've gone mad. I've been looking at a Dutch bungalow a mile away," she says.

The divorced gran has splashed out a bit on her four children and eight grandchildren, including by treating them to a holiday in Scotland. Not that she couldn't have afforded somewhere more exotic - she just likes it there.

Is she surprised by her success, as others doubtless are? "Not really," she says. "I always knew I could do it."

* Run For Home by Sheila Quigley (Random House, £9.99) is published on April 1.