Oxford author Sarah Loving was overjoyed when her book, Fifty Fifty, was accepted for publication. And she says Oxford has played a big part in her success. Not only was the story inspired by the animal rights protests in South Parks Road, but the local community helped in her path to publication.

Sarah, who writes under the penname SL Powell, came to Oxford to read English at Balliol College, then lived on a houseboat at Weirs Lane while teaching for Oxfordshire County Council’s adult learning programme. Knowing she had unfulfilled creative ambitions, her husband persuaded her to join an evening class run by children's illustrator Korky Paul at the former Peers School, which set her on the road to becoming a writer.

Korky Paul, the artist behind Winnie the Witch, who lives in North Oxford, has a reputation as a brilliant teacher. “I learned that I was not going to be an illustrator, but I wrote a couple of picture book texts to illustrate and he was massively complimentary.”

Encouraged, Ms Loving wrote some short stories. By then, she had moved into a house on dry land after giving birth to her daughter Martha, now 13. “East Oxford being how it is, there was a mother at SS Mary and John School, Stephanie Hale, who ran a literary consultancy. I paid her to assess the manuscript and she found me an agent.”

Taking up a redundancy offer gave her more time for writing, but brought its own problems “My husband said ‘you have to write your book’ but I was really scared. I had been doing that job all my adult life and I thought ‘What if I can’t write?’ and ‘What if I can’t get another job?’. But once I stopped work, I got all these ideas.”

At the third attempt, she hit the jackpot with Fifty Fifty, a novel for young adults featuring Gil, an angry teenager at odds with his scientist father. “I’ve always been fascinated by science, and the story was inspired by the controversy about the animal research lab in South Parks Road, Oxford. I have followed it in the local newspaper and been amazed at the lengths animal activists will go to, planning to harm people and possibly kill people to try to protect the rights of animals.”

As she points out, Britons’ attitudes to animals are full of contradictions, with millions of pounds going to donkey sanctuaries, while most people are happy to eat meat. “Gil is terribly angry and people have asked how I can write about a boy like that; whether I am exorcising my inner angry young man. It’s possibly true.”

As she wrote, she found her views changing. “I thought at first that if there is no other way, that if experiments on animals are the only way to find a cure for a human disease, that’s acceptable. Now I’m uncertain about the whole thing.”

Her own tension about the issues comes through in the novel, which is marketed as a thriller, although it is as much about moral dilemmas as about action-packed chases.

The book is dedicated to her friend Kathleen Bailey, who died of lymphoma after receiving the full spectrum of cancer treatments, from chemotherapy to radiotherapy, all of which have been developed through animal experiments.

She has been overwhelmed by the way that 12 to 13-year-old boys identify with the main character.

“It’s great that they say ‘I’m going to tell my mates about it’. It is wonderful to think that the story I had written, that only existed in my head for so long, that the lives of the characters are now valued by other people,” she said.

She is now in demand as a school speaker, and is an ambassador for Science Oxford.

As well as the Oxford people who helped her on the road to publication, she is harnessing the community spirit to help sell the novel. First she took a stall at East Oxford Farmers’ Market, and now Gibbons Bakery, opposite SS Mary and John School, is selling her book alongside the bread rolls.

“The book is with a mainstream publisher, and it’s on sale in big shops like Waterstone’s,” she said. “But the bread shop is like a village shop — everyone goes there on the way to school.”

* Fifty Fifty is published by Piccadilly Press at £6.99.