It was reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment as a teenager that made me fall in love with literature and want to become a writer. This dark 19th-century Russian novel forced me to spend several days in the company of a narcissistic yet also sensitive, intelligent and idealistic antihero, Raskolnikov, inviting me to sympathise with him on one page, recoil from him on the next, sympathise, recoil, sympathise, recoil and on and on in this vein. It was a sweaty, frantic and thrilling experience unlike any I’d had with a book before. For weeks after finishing it, I turned over the reasons for his actions – so many were plausible and simultaneously none.
I soon moved on to authors such as Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Nabokov, Zadie Smith, Martin Amis and Monica Ali and started keeping notebooks and writing short stories. Having
