If you look at the history of the letter in the novel, small changes in the British postal service became really significant because of how quickly people are suddenly able to communicate, and letters actually arrive at the intended time, and they arrive to the correct recipient. All of this is really important to a plot.
A lot of people ask me, did debating help me as a writer, and I honestly don't know.
I definitely don't aspire to writing that's 'timeless,' whatever that means.
In my fiction, I pursue this idea of intimacy, but also - philosophically, politically - I just feel like that's the interesting question for me. How much can we share with other people? I'm not interested in human individuality; I don't even know what that means.
You cannot write about what people are really like without making a political adjudication. All our ideas of what human nature consists of or how people really feel and experience life are, at their base, political ideas.
I am not trying to speak for anyone else, never mind an entire generation. I don't even know what that means.
I'm only interested in writing about relationships.
I don't have any answers as to whether the Internet is a good or a bad thing, but it's certainly an important thing for the novel because novels are so much about communication, and when communication changes, the novel has to change.
Class is something that I think seriously about and try to organise my politics around. I think there are lots of novels that don't really engage with questions of class at all, and they get less conversation about issues of social privilege than I do. But it's better to try and talk about it and maybe fail.
I couldn't quite get the hang of how to socialise as a teenager. I didn't really understand it.
I like Christianity. I'm a fan of Jesus and his whole philosophy but not the social teaching aspects of it, of course.
To feel that literature has any politically redemptive power at all just seems increasingly naive.
For me, watching Mohamed Salah play football is not unlike staring up at the stars and contemplating the vastness of the universe: it makes my own life seem nice and small.
We're not always the most insightful about ourselves.
I try not to let myself get too wrapped up in the image of whatever my books have become in the outside world.
I don't really believe in the idea of the individual.
I think my characters are all fairly fundamentally decent, even if they have negative characteristics.
Dominant and emerging forms of interpersonal communication have to find their way into literary language somehow - think of the epistolary novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Being shortlisted for the Swansea University International Dylan Thomas Prize is, of course, a real honour for me and my work. When I wrote 'Conversations with Friends,' it was hard for me to imagine the book even finding readers - so it's a huge privilege to find it judged alongside such exciting and innovative new writing. I'm very grateful.
I'm not sure that the culture of literary prizes is always a good thing, but while there are literary prizes, it's nice to be nominated.
