The profession of ‘writer’ wasn’t listed among the boxes you ticked for careers night… How novelists learnt their craft and made a career of it, to me was an utter enigma.

‘The day I learned there were people who, for kicks, pilfered eggs from the nests of birds on the verge of extinction, I plunged from sorrow into existential despair.’

‘Writers don’t need to be prisoners, or exiles, or cursed by elements of their own society to feel an outsider. The biographies of writers are littered with references to feelings of distance.’