When the forces are aligning against hybridity, it harms everyone, as we are all migrants. Growing up in Pakistan, I know just how oppressive that kind of puritanical mindset can be.

I think I've always been drawn to the second person. When I was growing up and playing with my friends, the usual way we interacted with imaginary worlds was as characters: a bench was 'your' boat, leaves on a lawn were the fins of sharks out to get 'you.'

Growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s, I lived in the shadow of a tyrannical state.

I feel no desire to write a novel that takes place in the past.

Music and fashion and art - they were the things we were willing to die for. 'Is my hair all right? Have you heard this tune?' They're the things that saved us. They're the things that are saving kids on Nuneaton council estates. There's no other way out.

I started writing songs for youth theater and stuff, and so it's really writing music for the stage that started me out, but then I eventually went to music college and did a two-year course in contemporary music and then just played in endless bands, cover bands, jazz bands.

Write a story a great writer would write. Because part of becoming an artist is pushing through all the disbelief of those around you, deciding that you are a writer when you have no idea what a plot is or whether what you've written is any good, or anything.

Before I was a mother, when I played characters that were mothers, I used my imagination, of course.