I grew up in Cyprus and Egypt, these fantastic places I remember fondly.

In the end, all you want is someone to long for you when it comes time to put you in the ground.

For me it was a lot harder to come to terms with the death of my grandfather than it was to come to terms with what's happened to the former Yugoslavia.

I like dark subject matter. I'm not sure what that means about me!

In terms of people that I know, my grandmother and my mother are huge influences on my writing life because they are both massively supportive and always have been of my career.

When I was eight years old, I wrote a paragraph-long short story about a goat on my mother's hundred-pound, black-and-white-screen laptop. The story came about largely because I liked the way the word 'goat' looked on the page, but I decided then and there that I wanted to be a writer. That desire never changed.

My mother always says that fear and pain are immediate, and that, when they're gone we're left with the concept, but not the true memory.