‘It wasn’t all smoked kippers and ginger beer, there were smugglers, kidnappers and poison pen letters. Where were the parents in all this? Working, sick, away, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that those four children and Timmy the dog were in danger, and me along with them.’

‘I will often tell students that you must work hard to become better at poetry, and I believe it, but a part of me thinks that a true poet is born with a certain pair of eyes…that take in the small and the large simultaneously, eyes that can see through walls of brick, skin and history, to the pained and pain-inflicting heart of things.’

‘Mr Ondaatje’s bewitching tome has been like my tuning fork over the years — very different, of course, to my own writing — but Coming Through Slaughter sets the bar in terms of daring and risk-taking. All I need is a paragraph from its deliciously audacious pages to get me in the mood and I’m off and racing.’

‘It was Hemingway, in particular, who mastered, in prose form, the playwright’s technique of ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’. Both he and Chekhov wanted readers to bring to the story what an actor would offer when performing a play: engagement, interpretation, a process that invites the reader, like the thespian, to become a collaborator in the making of meaning.’