I am really pleased with Far North [the forthcoming film of one of her short stories]. I didn’t want to script it myself; so I just sold them the rights, and got a large sum of money, which helps a lot. And I was really surprised to find how comfortable I was with Sean Bean; and Michelle Yeoh was out of this world. She had really gone for the part, and they all threw themselves into the shooting of it, in the north of Norway. Michelle insisted on doing all the outside shots without gloves. It was very realistic.

I’ve never been so far north. But I like writing about places I’ve never been to. I was so pleased when I went to the jungle once and discovered that I had imagined it rightly in a story I had just written.

The film is incredibly beautiful, but extremely violent. It’s a violent story, I suppose, but I hadn’t realised how much more violent things seem when you see them rather than when you read about them.

My family is very precious to me. I have a daughter in New York and a son travelling in Patagonia. But the bigger family is important, too. I was one of six children, and we were all rather high breeders, and have stayed close to each other. I think the cousinly relationship is very old-fashioned and a great joy: enough relationship without being pressured or competitive.

I’ve never been so happy. [She has left London and has built her own hermitage in Dumfriesshire near her family.] There’s a deep satisfaction in building your own house. I’m happiest when I wake up very, very early in the morning and it’s sunny, and I can sit on my front doorstep with my coffee and look at absolutely nothing except the austere moorland. When the hen harrier comes down — that’s joy.

I loathed school, and can’t think of any teachers who were important to me. My most important teacher was my father. He was the managing director of a big printing firm before he took early retirement and moved back to Scotland to look after his land. He was so annoyed that girls weren’t taught Latin from the age of eight, as boys were, that he taught me Latin himself.

I always wanted to be a writer. In my father’s desk, after he died, we found he’d kept little mementoes of each of his children. Mine was my first novel, handwritten, about one of my dolls.

I’ve been inspired most by the Bible, fairy stories, and myth. In my 20s, Angela Carter expanded my ideas of what might be writeable. I really admire Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead for the stillness at its centre, and I think Salman Rushdie is an extraordinary writer. I love Moby Dick. I’m keen on Dostoevsky. In fact, I’m keen on any writer who’s prepared to take on . . . spirituality? I hate that word.

What really makes me angry? The word “spirituality”.

I reread Jane Austen for pleasure — chick-lit with good grammar.

My family say my feminism is entirely founded on greed. When we were young we used to go beating for the pheasant shoots. The boys got a ten-bob note, and we girls didn’t. There may be something in that, and, of course, it’s enjoyable to be involved in a cause that benefits oneself, but there is a massive global injustice here which cries to heaven. And women are oppressed on so many levels, from clitorectomy, or the life of a woman who has to walk for miles to fetch water for her family, to the fact that it’s impossible to get your plumber to listen properly to you.

I write most days, but not in a routine.

At the moment I’m completing a book on silence, to be published by Granta in September. It’s taken eight years, and it’s partly a personal account, and partly a cultural history, looking at silence in fairy stories, and the invention by St Ambrose of silent reading.

I pray a lot, mostly in silence. One’s petty things creep in, and of course I do intercessory prayer. But mostly it’s apophatic prayer, the prayer of adoration.

I’m deeply grounded in Genesis. I love to read it, think about it, write about it. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam can really meet in this shared text, and it isn’t about morals but faith.

I have great difficulties with Paul. There’s no point in the epistles where he suggests someone else knows more than he does. And he goes on about community but doesn’t actually have one. (But I know it’s partly how we read him, and we wouldn’t be Christians without him, and so we should be grateful.)

My good friend, Frankie Ward, really liked a story I wrote about St Columba, and asked me to get involved in Bradford Cathedral’s Artspace programme. Over the past 20 years I’ve done a lot of work on the connections between art and religion.

I feel very strongly about this: most Christian art is second-rate. Seventy-three per cent of the people in this country say they actively believe in God, and we have no fiction for them. I’ve given the “Daughters of Jerusalem” piece to the Bethnal Green Stations of the Cross, because supporting art is an important thing to do.

We’re repaying a debt really, because poetry emerges from religion, not the other way round. And it is God who creates, and then we create, in imitation of him. I feel very passionately about that, and wrote about the connection between art and faith in A Big-Enough God.

Five years after I’m dead, I’d like to be remembered as a good friend. Fifty years after I’m dead, I’d like to be remembered as a person who tried to keep faith and literature together.

I’d most like to be locked in Bradford Cathedral with Simon of Cyrene — or with Jim Crace, author of Quarantine, because he’s the most intelligent and polite atheist I know.

Sara Maitland was talking to Terence Handley MacMath.

Far North and Other Dark Tales is published by Maia Press on 27 March (£8.99; 978-1-904559-27-6).

Sara Maitland was talking to Terence Handley MacMath.

Far North and Other Dark Tales is published by Maia Press on 27 March (£8.99; 978-1-904559-27-6).