Where are you now? My parents’ house in Hampstead, north London. Where and when do you do most of your writing? At a desk or kitchen table wherever I am living. If you have one, what is your pre-writing ritual? I set the timer for 180 minutes on a program called SelfControl which blocks most...
As my father drove my mother to the nursing home in Malacca, Malaya, their car came under heavy fire. Two weeks later, on August 16th 1948, I was born. Two months before that, in June, three British rubber-planters were shot dead by men arriving on bicycles, thus inflaming tensions that resulted in a state of...
The times are turning bad again. I have been arrested for going to see a private art collection. Can you believe it? An old man of nearly eighty, a retired magistrate, is put in prison on suspicion. Instead of sitting on a dais giving judgment, here I am sitting on a stone floor waiting to...
My best friend was swallowed by the earth when I was ten years old. Eleven years later and I don’t remember much about him. His name was Jake Delong and I think his parents were separated. He lived with his mother. I always liked how she said my name: To-om, pronouncing Tom as if it...
Kirsty Wark greets me at the front door of her London pad wearing a pinny and no make-up. Truly impressive: here is a woman so comfortable in her skin (and in HD) who instantly inspires trust and warmth – the latter greatly helped by the spring sunshine that splits the sky. Setting up our camera...
Yiyun Li’s latest novel was inspired by a real-life poisoning case in China in 1995, in which a 19-year-old student was paralysed and severely disabled, but did not die. The culprit was never discovered, but suspicion still falls on a roommate from a well-connected family who subsequently fled to America. The slow poisoning in Kinder...
History, according to the heartfelt judgement of a young scholar in Alan Bennett’s marvellous play The History Boys “[is] just one fuckin’ thing after another.” Biology is a bit like this, because evolution works with a single set of raw materials within the constraints imposed by the planet’s environmental conditions. Every cell is surrounded by...
As both a reader and writer of stories, I love, perhaps more than any other quality of the form, the daring that defines the very best short stories: that breathtaking break with expectation, or subject matter, or reality as we know it. No story writer, it seems to me, had – or has – a...
It is risky to return to anything that one loved thirty years ago – a boyfriend, a city, an outfit. But I had a hunch that Lorrie Moore’s ‘How to Be an Other Woman’ would hold up pretty well, although it now feels distinctly historical with its references to office work in which the clerical...
Rebecca Hunt is one of the friendliest people I’ve ever met, never mind interviewed. Her incredibly poised debut novel Mr Chartwell was published when she was 31 (she’s now 34), and sold in ten countries. Also longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, she could frankly be excused for taking herself very seriously indeed. But...
Amanda Lindhout’s remarkable memoir A House in the Sky tells the harrowing, ultimately inspirational story of her 460 days in captivity as a hostage in Somalia. Moved between derelict desert houses where she was kept in the dark, in chains, starved, and repeatedly beaten and abused by her teenage captors, she was able to call...
The blast from an improvised explosive device moves at 13,000 mph, gets as hot as 7,000 degrees and creates 400 tons of pressure per square inch. “No one survives that. We’re trying to save the kids at 25 meters and beyond.” – Ronald Glasser in the Army Times If this poem had wires coming out...
