The summer I finished my first novel Ghana Must Go, I drove across west Africa: from Accra to Lomé to Cotonou to the deliciously named Ouagadougou.

I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.

When writing screenplays, it's a matter of remembering to leave off the page anything and everything that doesn't appear on the screen.

As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully.

The big ideas always come in flashes. I don't really craft stories that much. I genuinely don't know where these people come from and I've often wondered if writing is just a socially acceptable form of madness.

Being a twin, and being my sister's twin, is such a defining part of my life that I wouldn't know how to be who I am, including a writer, without that being somehow at the centre.

So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual.