The thing that comes most frequently to me on yoga retreats is excruciating pain in my hips.

I was four when I announced my ambition to write, eight when I began publishing such claims.

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!

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.

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

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

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.