It has been a roundabout route to where I am today. Scenic? Yes. Tortuous? That, too. I was born in the Midlands to immigrant parents, which in early years always lent me a feeling of being the outsider, no bad thing for a writer, always observing, chronicling. The gentle melding of different cultures with their own individual yarns and traditions stayed with me through my childhood and underpinned my first attempted novel at the age of nine.

Stories always attracted me, their vibrancy so much more desirable than real life, tantalising snowflakes I

could never grasp for fear of melting them. Inevitably I became a tinkerer in writing, sporadically publishing early poems and my own fragile stories, while earning elsewhere the money which my words couldn’t muster. My work was nomadic, taking me for long periods out of England, again absorbing and filtering other nations’ stories and customs, in other people’s languages.

A watershed in my life brought me back to this country, where the words belonged to my own tongue and where I fell in love with them anew. The techniques I had learned over many years playing with short stories gave me the motivation for my first novel, The Cleaving of Paycocke’s. It may be one of many, it may be my last, who knows? That’s the beauty of it.