A cold and wet October night in Wimbledon was a far cry from the idyllic Greek summers of Victoria Hislop’s novels.

But on Thursday Victoria journeyed across the city from her Chelsea home to Wimbledon High School to discuss her latest offering with Jane Thynne.

Speaking to the Wimbledon Guardian before the public event, Victoria revealed how a holiday visit to Spinalonga off the island of Crete changed her life forever.

“It took me completely by surprise and it was a sense of something having been misunderstood by me, and I thought, by other people, what Leprosy was,” she said.

Spinalonga is a former leper colony where people with the disease were sent to live, isolated from their friends and family.

She said it became clear the portrayal of people with Leprosy had been distorted and they were not ghouls and monsters like they are seen to be.

Despite working as a freelance travel journalist, Victoria said her desire to delve into the past of Spinalonga was the antithesis of journalism.

She said: “I was doing a lot of travel journalism a decade ago and I realised Spinalonga would make a really interesting piece for the Sunday Telegraph but at the same time it would be not exactly an insult to the memories of these people, but there was more I needed to use my imagination for.”

Victoria said what she ended up with – her best-selling first novel The Island – was completely fictional.

Victoria is married to Private Eye editor and Have I got News for You regular Ian Hislop and they have two children – Emily and William, who are in their twenties.

She said the family has always lived in places with an ‘S’ in the postcode, Balham, Clapham, Battersea and Wandsworth and now happily live in Chelsea.

“It’s very traditional in its way but very cosmopolitan,” she said.

Despite having a passion for London, Victoria said she would stick to the Mediterranean as the glorious settings for her stories.

She spoke with Jane Thynne, also an accomplished novelist and friend of Victoria’s, about being drawn to isolated places and derelict buildings, and thought London had far too many people in for her plots.

Her current book The Sunrise, is set in Famagusta in northern Cyprus in the 1970s, an abandoned city where people’s possessions have remained untouched for decades.

She said: “I do a lot of background reading and this current novel is set in the 1970s, so it’s a time I remember.

“I was 14 years-old when this took place.

“Research has been slightly different this time – with lots of reading about why Cyprus was in this situation. But you become it; it’s something you can imagine.”

Equally as accomplished in short stories as full novels, Victoria said she finds the former an extremely pleasurable activity.

She explained you can be more adventurous with a short story, and create a totally new persona which may not be able to be sustained over the course of a novel.

“You can become a man, you can write in the first person, which personally I find very difficult over 120,000 words but in 2,000 words you can be a creature from another planet and write something that holds people’s interest.

“Be adventurous – that’s my advice,” she said with a grin.

Victoria Hislop’s new novel, The Sunrise, is out now.