Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell, and Jonathan Swift are obvious heroes for me. I love Herman Melville and Mervyn Peake. I am a big fan of Angela Carter, Rose Tremain, Gunther Grass, the early Jeanette Winterson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie - and I’ve recently discovered Anne Tyler. How much I’m influenced by these writers I’m not sure, because I think that writing is all about personality, and whatever one writes, it's one’s own personality - which is by definition original and unique - that’s coming through, more than anything else. But I do know that the writers I admire – and in the case of Kurt Vonnegut, fetishise – set a kind of gold standard for me to aspire to.

As a writer I’m categorised as ‘difficult to categorise’, if you can call that a category – which I guess it now is. I see myself as a satirist with a heart, but heart and satire aren’t always seen as working together. But they can, and in my work, I hope they do. I am definitely not a very typically ‘girly’ writer – although I am a sucker for a love story like anyone else, and The Paper Eater contains quite a big one, between two social misfits. To me, the fictional worlds I create really aren’t much different from the real world I know. They’re very much rooted in daily life, and the here and now. All I do is distort them very slightly.

If I had to think up the name of a category, to get myself out of this difficult-to-categorise category, it would be something like Fantastical Realism. You could see it as realism that takes the subconscious into account. Or as fantasy that takes reality into account. What I am occupied with is the point where the inner life and outer life collide.