Q. Where did your journey of writing poetry begin?
Very atypically, I can pinpoint an exact moment where I had a damascene conversion - where poetry very suddenly entered my life properly, for the first time. Back in about 2008 I was in the big Borders on Oxford Street in London, idly browsing - I'd just got back from a weekend away in Berlin, and was looking for a book, to ‘commemorate' the weekend, as it were. I was in that state of drifting, not really concentrating, and I found myself in the poetry section; on display was ‘Ashes for Breakfast' by the German poet Durs Grünbein, in a translation by Michael Hofmann. I started flicking through it... and it was like a light going on. I was transfixed - not just by the sheer sensation of, "My God, words can do this?" but the sudden sense of "Wow, this is the stuff I want to be writing. Why did no one tell me this existed before?"
