I've written over 100 short stories. You could say I'm obsessed with short stories.

I was interested in the ways that artists responded to totalitarianism - the Czech Jazz Section, Romanian absurdist theatre, Brecht's alienation effect. The anything-goes, anarchic qualities of jazz and Surrealism seemed to offer a way to cross some of the forbidden frontiers of Eastern Europe.

I only like naturalistic stories. I love short, fantastic stories that cast a spell over the reader, that transport you instantly to another place with another set of rules, somewhere imagined by someone else.

What the short story needs above all is for one of the big publishers to get an equivalent series up and running and to support it and promote it.

The Belgians tend to downplay the cultural divide issue, and the far-right issue, but there's a staggering degree of casual racism in Belgium, much worse than in the UK.

I have no patience with up-themselves authors who complain about having to trail round a few bookshops signing stock.

The idea that a student can write a sonnet or a novel without having a sound understanding about its history, and where it fits into literature as a whole, seems to me to be manifestly daft.