Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed.

We are creatures of story.

If the garden of Eden really exists it does so moment by moment, fragmented and tough, cropping up like a fan of buddleia high up in the gutter of a deserted warehouse, or in a heap of frozen cabbages becoming luminous in the reflected light of roadside snow.

However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.

My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.