When I'm working, I'm so narrowly focused on sound, language, rhythm, flow, that I rarely feel the emotion of the text. It's only after - long after - I've finished a piece that I can experience in any way its emotional charge.

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!

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.

Sight is subjective. We learned that in class.

I consider myself West African, among other cultural identities, and a writer, among other creative ones.

I've written fiction for as long as I can remember; it's always been my preferred form of play.

As a writer, one is obliged to release her words, to let them live in the world on their own.