My favourite authors change all the time. I have always liked Kurt Vonnegut, Rose Tremain, Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Heller.
2.Who has had a major influence on your writing?
Richard Brautigan, Enid Blyton, Kurt Vonnegut, Bob Dylan
3.Name a book you never finished?
I have never finished Lord Of The Rings although I have tried at different times in my life. But it has never been the right time.
4.What word or words do you always have trouble spelling?
Disappear and professional
5.What three adjectives best describe you?
Eccentric, quiet, self-assured.
6.Which of your characters would you want to be and why?
In Currawalli Street, I would like to be Janet, the reverend’s sister because she conducts two completely different lifestyles concurrently. She does so with dignity, grace, honesty and fulfils her grand imagination without one having to know about the other.
7.Which author would you invite to dinner?
I would invite two authors and one illustrator to dinner. Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Louis Stevenson and the illustrator Neil Curtis. The two authors would swap stories so that I wouldn’t have to say much and Neil, because he was my friend who made me laugh when I wasn’t expecting to, and who I would like to share a meal with again. He and Vonnegut shared a similiar sense of the absurd. I expect that Robert Louis Stevenson and I would laugh all night.
8.Where do you write?
In an office above a restaurant, overlooking a café and a Greek church. Sometimes the smell of garlic and onions wafts up from the restaurant when the chef prepares for the coming night; all the time I can hear the laughter and talking from the busy café; and on occasions the priest from the church walks up the street in the morning swinging a big bowl of incense and chanting.
9.When do you write?
I generally spend two full days a week at the office and try to start as early as possible because that seems to be when all my good ideas come out. In the morning I let the characters do whatever they want, say whatever they want, go wherever they want. In the afternoon, I go back over what I have written and choose what they should do, what they should say, where they should go. And that way I shape the story. And most likely I will walk home that night knowing that the story has gone in an entirely different direction to where I thought it was going the previous day. But two days isn’t enough so I write at home at night. I think that I can’t leave a story untouched for a week or it will lose its vitality and so everyday I add to it or plump it up or squeeze it out just so it doesn’t go stale.
10.What makes you happy?
In writing, a well executed description that comes close to what I wanted to say; a story line that seems to know where it is going without me deciding anything. And in life, hearing my partner laugh makes me happy.
11.What do you most fear?
In writing, each story takes me a little further down the one path. I fear that one day I will discover that the path these stories have taken me down, is the wrong one. And in life, I fear that I will not be able to protect my child.
12.What is your favorite vice?
Roast potatoes. Lamingtons. Pernod.
13.What is the quality you most like in yourself?
A out-of-step wisdom that comes from the experience of seeing and reading lots of things.
14.What are the qualities you most like in your friends?
Kindness, gentleness, humour, strength of character.
15.Would you be lying if you said your works were not autobiographical?
No, I would not be lying. I use my mind to process a character’s attitude or motive but they are not my attitudes or motives. I think it would be constrictive to make characters too autobiographical. And I know for a fact, that I am not that interesting. Part of the enjoyment of writing a book is to make a character do something that I would not do and then have to defend or justify or process it into the character’s thoughts and therefore, by proxy, do something that I would never do and have to live with it.
16.What part of your personality do you detest?
I am flippant.
17.What is your favorite adjective?
absurd
18.What is your favorite book?
'Catch 22' by Joseph Heller
19.What book would you read three times?
'Smiley’s People' by John Le Carre
20.To whom would you award the Nobel Prize for Literature and why?
Spike Milligan. Because there is only one Spike Milligan and his writing has most likely infiltrated everybody’s life in some unnoticed way. He wrote funny things which, together, ended up describing a great sadness for the world.
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