I don't listen to music when I write - I find it distracting.

I found myself sitting at the computer, and I thought I was going to write a kind of simple nostalgic story about two boys and their love of kite fighting. But stories have a will of their own, and this one turned out to be this dark tale about betrayal, loss, regret. The short story which was about 25 pages long sat around for a couple of years.

I don't listen to music when I write - I find it distracting.

A sudden happiness catches me unawares. I feel it trickling into me, and my eyes go liquid with gratitude and hope.

You are never alone in Afghanistan. You are always in the company of others, usually family. You don't understand yourself really as an individual, you understand yourself as part of something bigger than yourself. Family is so central to your identity, to how you make sense of your world, it is very dramatic, and therefore an amazing source of storytelling, a source of fiction for me.

I now know that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse.

It's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.