I was born in 1968 and I didn’t start writing books until 2010 – that’s over forty years of not doing something which I love and now do every day.

And when I’m not writing, I’m reading. Books, papers, magazines, websites, film and TV scripts, anything. Mind you, I’ve always read a lot. We had no telly until I was 13, so that, coupled with my three older sisters hogging the phone and the record player, (and the house always being freezing), meant that I seemed to spend a lot of time shivering under my duvet with a book.

I finally got out of bed and went to Manchester University where I studied Spanish, left in 1991, and went to Spain for a year where I worked for Eurodisney showing crowds of happy Spaniards in and out of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle. Then I got a job at the BBC as a script reader. That was a great job. You sit in a room with three other people, and you read scripts which people have written and sent in to the BBC in the hope that they’ll be turned into television programmes. Then I became a TV script editor, then a producer, and then, finally, a writer.

Now I live in London with my wife and three kids, and every day I get to do what I love best. I get to tell stories. In fact I’ve just written three short films for the Vanity Fair website – Sometimes it’s bedtime stories to my kids, sometimes it’s really complicated excuses that I make up because I haven’t done something I’m supposed to, but mostly it’s books. So I get up in the morning, my wife goes off to work, the children go off to school, and then I turn the heating on, I go into my office, I close the door, and I write. I write about writing, I talk about writing, I read about writing and I write about reading.