‘Success’ in literature, a field defined as perhaps no other by setbacks and reversals, can take many forms and arise in the least expected of places.

‘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.’

‘I often find myself drawn to novelists who are also poets; some of their works travel with me to the places in which I write.’

‘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.’

’Visiting a foreign city leaves me fantasising about what it would be like to cloak myself in another identity and live in another world’

‘There was always more to marvel at. The creation of emotion. The uncanny beauty of a phrase upon the page. The places you went which you never expected to see.’

Write about what you don’t know. If you are setting out to write a novel, you are in it for the long haul. You better be sure you’ll stay interested.

Hone and hone that draft till the story emerges, the way a sculpture emerges from what was once a block of stone.

It was when this long apprenticeship began to expose me to things that felt compelling that I truly began to write.

The writing life can be a tug-of-war between creation and procrastination; the need to produce, and the hurdles that get in the way.