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.

In the mess of moving from place to place, I skipped two grades in the space of one year.

death should be celebrated...when you put something in the ground you always know where it is

My road to publishing actually came through a colleague who connected me to my agent, and the faculty at Cornell was very supportive.

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.

At the end of the day, despite all the other great things that literature does in society and in a person's life, I think that we read to escape. And I think that place, more than anything, provides that escape quickly, if an author is engaged with the place.

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