‘I write until I’ve written about forty thousand words and then I wonder what I’m doing for a couple of years and then I write about another thirty thousand words and at some point my husband, who is a brilliant ghost writer and editor, reads it and we have a conversation about it, then I cut a load of words and noodle about with it for a while longer and then give it to my agent.’

‘In order to connect with what I’m writing, I read it out loud in character. It lets me feel the way the character might say something, listen to the rhythms, find the silences.’

‘A good writer should be a voracious reader. I never did a single creative writing course – I learnt everything from reading and studying other authors.’

‘I try my best not to read reviews - people can be cruel and I am a fragile thing. But there’s one review that always makes me laugh, which said, “‘Spoilt Creatures’ is not a novel that I particularly admire.” Speak your truth.’

'I’ve heard a few writers say - Zadie Smith being one of them - that the novel, short story, whatever it might be, is representative of the writer at that particular time. You will never think in exactly the same way and therefore you will never write the same again. A comfort, I think.'

'My short stories can take just a few hours, or years, to make it to the page. Again, I get a lot of my ideas from close observation of place, people, and asking why and how.'

'Looking back, I really thought of the written world as a built, existing world - a discourse, to use the adult term - and my intention was not to make value judgements but orient myself within it.'

‘It is very hard to feel that those around you value book festivals more than doing anything possible to put a spanner in this poisoned system that kills and maims racialised children every single day. Most people want a quiet life. That’s hard, because if you’re marginalised that's not an option for you; you’re right up against the world’s clamour every single moment.’

‘I have two primary ways of writing: 1) slowly and deliberately, and 2) accidentally. In the first case, a project usually starts with an idea that is persistent enough to grow more clear rather than dimmer in the time it takes me to attend to it. Once I am writing, the idea eventually yields a feeling—some line or passage reveals the heart of the piece.’

‘I am working on a new collection. It's set in Jersey, in the channel islands, where I spent exactly half of my childhood. It's a strange place, in lots of ways, but very beautiful too. Politically it's like Nigel Farage fell asleep watching The Truman Show, but the coastlines are breathtaking.’

‘I need to reach a certain point in a novel’s development where I feel it has acquired the necessary heft, before I can begin to discuss or share it with anyone else. Before that point, everything feels too fragile and tentative to expose to the air.’

‘Writing my memoir was akin to opening a time capsule, all the work that went into it. It was simultaneously exciting and exhausting.’

‘It’s very easy to think that when you stop writing – or are forced to stop writing – that you’ll never write anything worth reading again. It is hard to hold on to self-belief, and feels indulgent too, but if everyone felt like this, about all the art they make, where would we be?’

‘But the writing of the novel comes with an utterly different form of concentration, from the first line. I start at that first line, or perhaps a single image, and head on. Inevitably I will go back and chip away at it, again and again, but that's the foundation stone.’

‘“Attend to your sentences,” from the titan that is Leone Ross, whom I consider a lifelong mentor. Every time we speak, she signs off with that instruction, and I think to myself, yes, I can’t do very much about the business-side of writing. The only thing that I can control are my sentences.’

‘That Vehicle especially has almost sold 2000 copies and has been well received shows that trad publishing has low expectations of both literature and readers.’

‘If I’m asked to write a piece about an artist, it’s actually probably less a true profile in the expansive, authoritative sense, but something more compressed: a story focused on them almost as a character — or maybe call it a portrait, an encounter with that artist.’

‘I’m not entirely sure what my creative process is yet. I started Rural at University (Masters in Creative Writing) so there were projects and deadlines, which I know I like to work to. I like a structure. So now I’m starting my next book, I’m feeling a little lost. Maybe I’ll need to pretend I’m doing my Masters again.’

‘I’m a gifted procrastinator, which means I have to get my wife to hide my laptop on writing mornings so I don’t fritter them away online. If I’m researching a project, I try to combine reading and note-taking with experimental fragments of narrative: writing dialogue between characters, say, or bits of description.’