Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.

I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.

I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

I'd always done family-friendly stuff. I wanted to do a film where I could show my darker side and make people uncomfortable.

I don't believe in regretting - one should try to move on. My mum was good at that. She was deeply in love with my father, and he died when I was nine. She remarried, and her second husband died, too. I saw the grieving process she went through. My mother had this way of moving on. It was a fine trait.

The first pages of memory are like the old family Bible. The first leaves are wholly faded and somewhat soiled with handling. But, when we turn further, and come to the chapters where Adam and Eve were banished from Paradise, then, all begins to grow clear and legible.

My mother and father met through climbing and it was totally natural that I would become a climber too.