I learned to read on Roald Dahl, C. S. Lewis and Enid Blyton, who gave me (respectively) a taste for the absurd and the magical and a keen awareness of gender stereotypes. Childhood holidays in Britain and the Mediterranean left me with a strong interest in place, though I spent my teenage years wandering the likes of Middle Earth and the Discworld. Then I caught the travel bug in St Petersburg and discovered the more tangible delights of planet Earth, shifting my reading from fantastical adventures to the exotic tales of real travellers. As an undergraduate my new-found love of languages helped me to explore Europe’s cultures from the inside, while reading Edward Said put my own orientalism in perspective. Another great discovery at Edinburgh was Italo Calvino, whose mathematical mind appealed to my own. Studying travel writing as a postgraduate gave me the luxury of time to think about representation and cultural difference, but I devoted all my spare hours to reading novels. My enthusiasm for the short story grew when I finally allowed myself to take my own fiction writing seriously and began to study the craft.
All of these influences (among many others) have informed my literary tastes and fed into my writing. For me, writing is a way of being in the world, a way of digesting life. Like digestion, it inevitably produces a lot of crap, but also the sparks of energy that fuel us, move us, keep us going on a cold wet night.