‘Poetry can be intensely emotional, and it can reveal truths in ways that avoid the discursive. It is perhaps the lyric, with its unique characteristics of brevity, musicality, concentration of thought and emotion in a formalised way, which best exemplifies a poem’s ability to reverberate and animate consciousness, to bring us into connection with the inner life.’

‘For me, writing a complicated character is like putting together a puzzle with a thousand pieces, without a clear picture on the box to help guide you towards the final scene. And with puzzles like that, it’s always about where you start.’

‘When a piece is going to exist off the page there is a beautiful invitation to consider an additional form and function in that new medium.’

‘Reading YA as a young person empowered me with the language to talk about things that I didn’t know how to talk about. I found a library of reference for my many emotions and experiences.’

‘Research has given me characters and their stories and if the synopsis is the bones of my novel, research helps me put flesh on those bones.’

‘I’m a strong believer in the stimulating qualities of limitations: the more constraints you have to work within, the more creative you have to be; the less room you have to overthink, the better.’