Sophie Hannah

Some writers, I'm told, look for their characters' surnames in telephone directories. I don't - it seems too obvious. Or too deliberate: if you go looking for names, you're bound to find them, of course, but I've always had a superstitious hunch that the names you find by accident are always going to be better and more satisfying somehow.

I do read a lot, and I think in recent years the ratio between the amount of non-fiction and fiction has tipped quite considerably. I did read fiction as a teenager as well, mostly because I was forced to read fiction, of course, to go through high school.