My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint..

I would like people to come into my Dreamworld and then choose to stay..

If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us..

I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all..

Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present..

Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive..

Mourning Ruby is not a flat landscape: it is more like a box with pictures painted on every face. And each face is also a door which opens, I hope, t….

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setti….

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words..

When you are young you don't always realise how full of doubts everybody is..

To try to expunge an individual's history is a terrible violation..

I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sens….

However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like en….

Count Dracula had directed me to go to the Golden Krone Hotel, which I found, to my great delight, to be thoroughly old-fashioned, for of course I wa….

I can remember being in my pram: children stayed in their prams much longer then than they do now. A big bouncy pram with black covers and a hood wit….

We are creatures of story..

It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to….

Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away..

I was always influenced by language..

A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk..

Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue..