Dylan Lauren

I am a picky eater. By that I mean, I love to pick the raisins out of oatmeal raisin cookies, the chips out of chocolate chip cookies, the white side off of black and white cookies, and the vanilla center out of Oreos.

I really wanted to be a cartoonist, and I was in 4th or 5th grade and I would bring my drawings in, and I'd look around, and everyone could draw better than me. Everyone. My drawings were just awful. So that's why I had to write.

For a boy of ten, used to the coal bings and rust-coloured burns of Cowdenbeath, the fields and woodland of Kingswood, with its overgrown but stately avenue of copper-barked sequoias, felt like a local version of paradise.