Newsnight presenter fears for the smart phone generation at Oswestry talk

"Everything is truncated today, it is all about instant gratification," she says

"I remember where I was when I read Peter Pan or Little Women, and I want the same to happen for kids now, but I'm not sure it would."

The Newsnight presenter is speaking in Oswestry about her new novel, The House by the Loch, and says books have been a very important part of her life. This may have been influenced by her lawyer father, Jimmy Wark, who was a prodigious reader.

"When he died, the first thing we had to do was take all his library books back," she says at the event organised by Booka Bookshop as part of Independent Bookshop Week. As well as a passion for fiction, she reveals the cookery books of Wolverhampton-born chef Nigel Slater have also been a big influence.

Kirsty has spent more than 40 years in the news business, working in an industry where everything is about rapid communication and immediate access to information. But she believes today's world, where nobody expects to wait for anything, brings pressures of its own, and is concerned that children are losing their ability to let their minds wander.

Immersing

She believes schools have a role to play.

"I think the onus is on teachers to take them out of that, to take them back to a time before everything was speeded up," she says.

"The joy of a book is in immersing yourself in it, I want people to savour a book, it's not a race."

The House by the Loch is her second novel, and like the previous one it travels back and forth between the Second World War and recent times. But although much of it is set in modern-day Britain, she is at pains to point out that it is not the present day.

Again, it is today's obsession with social media and instant communication which is the reason for that.

"If you are setting a book in the now, it would be a big challenge with technology and communications, because of Facebook and Messenger, it's hard to write," she says.

"I would find it really difficult to set a book in 2019."

The book revolves around a grandfather who throughout his life is haunted by an incident he witnessed as a child during the Second World War, when a Spitfire pilot plunges to his death at Loch Doon, a picturesque and remote freshwater lake in Ayrshire, which she has fond memories of as a child.

"We spent holidays at nearby Kendoon, but Dad was a great fisherman and Loch Doon was where he came to fish."

She says her childhood in Scotland gave her a very strong sense of place and identity – she jokes that "Cumbria and Northumbria are really in Scotland" – but wonders whether today's youngsters, with their broader experience of travel, will share that sense of belonging.

"I know Scotland very well, probably better than my kids do, the only time I ever went abroad was on a school cruise," she says.

"I'm one of those people who could never have a sat-nav, I have to have a map."

Adore

Despite three decades working in London, she has always maintained a presence in Scotland, and her present house – which dates back to 1875 – will be a big influence on her next novel, which she intends to start work on early year.

Kirsty says taking time out of the hurly-burly of the political world has been a cathartic experience.

"I adore Newsnight, but the idea of being able to write is very hard, I didn't think I could do it.

Imagination

"Working in television is very collegiate, you are part of a team, but writing fiction is very different. I thought I was going to have to immerse myself in it, but once you are in that place, you don't want to come out.

"Coming up with an idea and seeing it through, there is something very permanent about it, it is something you hope will be remembered long after Newsnight from November 28 has been forgotten," she says.

The hard part of writing a novel, though, is knowing when to call it a day.

"It's like an artist doing a painting," she says. "You have to eventually accept that it will never be finished, and let the reader use their imagination to do the rest."