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.

Every Christmas, all around Ghana, there are tons of these parties and they are full of everything that exists in human life in Ghana and worldwide.

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.

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

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

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.

I live in Rome and five minutes from my flat is a church where you can walk in and see this beautiful Caravaggio. Just the way this man uses dark paint: dark to create dark to create dark, the layering of the darkness in his work. I just race home: I want to create!