PRIZEWINNING author Blake Morrison may live in a literary land a million miles away from the romantic kingdom of Mills and Boon -- but the East Lancashire-born writer is happy to admit he's been having a long-distance love affair for 30 years.

The London-based darling of the British book scene, who is tipped for more top honours following the publication of his new memoir Things My Mother Never Told Me, has an enduring passion for his homeground: its landscapes and its people.

The eminent writer and winner of the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award grew up in Earby and nearby Thornton in the 50s and 60s, and they feature like finely-chiselled characters in his highly-acclaimed books . Speaking from his home in the capital, he said: "East Lancashire still feels like home. It really is an original place."

In his latest work Blake returns to his favourite subject -- his northern childhood and the parents who continue to haunt him.

His 1993 best-seller And When Did You Last See Your Father? dealt candidly with the man who was Earby's GP for 40 years, in a confessional which won rave reviews. Now he has raided the family vault again to describe the life of his mother and to investigate her secret past.

Blake said: "It was a wonderful place to grow up.

"Sadly the area declined from what it had been, but now I think it's moved on. I like to get back as often as I can."

He has good reason for doing so: his sister still lives in Thornton and his beloved blue remembered hills are always waiting -- Pendle and the heights rolling away towards Yorkshire.

In Things My Mother Never Told Me he likens ancient Pendle to a vast burial mound and describes the streams running like tears down the faces of the fells. Is it, then, a melancholy landscape?

"I think you have to put those descriptions into the context of the time they were written," he said.

"My mother was very ill back home and I travelled something like 4,000 miles in a few weeks backwards and forwards from London to visit her.

"But when you wake up and see the hills out of your window it can be beautiful and uplifting."

Blake's father was Earby's familiar GP, practising from a surgery in Water Street, while his mother worked as a doctor at a maternity home over the border in Keighley. While he was still a child the family moved a couple of miles up the road from Earby to the Grange at Thornton -- a rambling house with outbuildings which Blake recalls became an East Lancashire 60s hotspot.

"We began putting on discos in the outbuildings and they gradually became well-known and the trendy place to go. People were coming up from as far away as Burnley and we were getting a hundred or so in.

But then people started smuggling in drink -- and drugs -- there was the odd fight, and my father decided it had all got out of hand. We had to stop!" he recalled.

Away from the homespun disco scene, Blake was studying hard and playing hard. "I was in the Barnoldswick Park Rovers' youth team and we were very successful. So successful, in fact, that some of us had a trial at Preston North End.

"I didn't hear any more afterwards -- I'm afraid that was the highspot of my footballing career," he said.

Soon, he was off to Nottingham University, and leaving forever the place he still calls home.

In When Did You Last See Your Father? Blake's mother Kim remains a mysterious, shadowy figure. She never told him, for instance, that she was born Agnes O'Shea, one of 20 children in an Irish family; he barely knew his Irish relations; and till her death he was unaware she was a Catholic.

Now, in his new book, he charts his long search to uncover the truth, via his parents' passionate wartime love affair and on to the foreign country that was East Lancashire in the 50s when marriage transported her there.

What next for the prodigious writer? "I think it's time to move on now, and I have started work on a novel," he said. "History and facts are easier, of course.

"Fiction is a leap in the dark."

He lives in Blackheath in south London with his wife and three teenage children, where he writes his acclaimed memoirs, novels and poetry. As well as the two already mentioned Blake's five other books are - As If: A Crime, a Trial, a Question of Childhood; The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry; The Justification of Johann Gutenberg; The Yellow House and Seamus Heaney (Contemporary Writers).

He is also contracted to write regular columns for the Guardian, who appropriately sent him out to the World Cup in Japan and Korea this summer to rekindle his love of soccer -- which took root along with so much else in his life in the East Lancashire of long ago.