Creative Writing Programmes Are Not Very Necessary.

I Am Drawn, As A Reader, To Detail-drenched Stories About Human Lives Affected As Much By The Internal As By The External, The Kind Of Fiction That Jane Smiley Nicely Describes As 'first And Foremost About How Individuals Fit, Or Don't Fit, Into Their Social Worlds.'

I Don't Believe That Art And Politics Or Social Issues Must Be Separated. In Writing About Marriage, For Example, Money Can Be A Big Factor, And Money Is Linked To Earning, And Earning Is Influenced By Politics.

At About The Age Of Seven … I Wrote Exactly The Kinds Of Stories I Was Reading: All My Characters Were White And Blue-eyed, They Played In The Snow, They Ate Apples, And They Talked A Lot About The Weather: How Lovely It Was That The Sun Had Come Out. This Despite The Fact That I Lived In Nigeria; We Didn’t Have Snow, We Ate Mangoes, And We Never Talked About The Weather, Because There Was No Need To.

The Novels I Love, The Ones I Remember, The Ones I Re-read, Have An Empathetic Human Quality, Or 'emotional Truth'. This Quality Is Difficult To Fully Define, But I Always Recognise It When I See It: It Is Different From Honesty And More Resilient Than Fact, Something That Exists Not In The Kind Of Fiction That Explains But In The Kind That Shows.

Each Time He Suggested They Get Married, She Said No. They Were Too Happy, Precariously So, And She Wanted To Guard That Bond; She Feared That Marriage Would Flatten It Into A Prosaic Partnership.