What was the first book to make an impression on you? I read To Kill a Mockingbird sitting on the steps of my council estate block when I was around 13. It portrayed a tenderness that it wasn’t permissible to show in the environments I grew up in. What was your favourite book as a child? My mum somehow found a Southern American dialect version Brer Rabbit in a charity shop – I still remember her doing the accents. And what is your favourite book or books now? I’ll keep banging on about my love of Roddy Doyle until my last breath. Funny as hell, black as tar, sentences so sharply constructed they could cut you while you read. What is your favourite quotation? “When the...
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