My mother was an avid reader and she taught me to read at an early age. We went to the library together every week. I remember reading the novels of Enid Blyton, the Billy Bunter books, the series of Biggles books, Just William and the other William books. I also read weekly comics, The Beano and Dandy, the Hotspur and later the Marvel comics and other horror comics.

I haven't read any of these since that time and have no intention of doing so. I suppose they stimulated my imagination and gave me some notion of how exciting written narrative can be. They also hooked me into the need for story. I read widely, classic, contemporary novels, newspapers, short stories, poetry.

The main influences during my teens would include the Americans, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner. At around the same time I was reading Zola and Dostoevski and Thomas Hardy. Later there was Knut Hamsun, Carson McCullers, Katherine Mansfield, and more recently, Carol Shields and Sylvia Plath.

If you're hankering after one it would be Hamsun because, he, more than any of the others, spoke directly to me. I responded to him in a more direct way, as if we were friends who had shared a unique view of the world. In retrospect I can see that this was all confined to his first four books. I was not impressed by his later works.

How have your personal experiences influenced your writing?

Absolutely. One can only really write about what one knows.

The direction of one's writing is concerned with identity and identity as far as art is concerned is to do with style. Style is the writer, it is what makes the writer a writer and what makes the writer the kind of writer that he, or she, is.

I don't think it is possible to distinguish between personal experience and literary experience. What happened in my 'real' life and what happened in my imagination are entirely indistinguishable by now. I often smile when people tell me that they don't read novels because they only want to read about facts. There is nothing you could write in a novel that hasn't already happened in the so-called real world.