It all starts with your story

At 21 years of age I had never read a book. I wanted to be a writer but I had never read a single book.

Born in 1976, I was raised in a leafy Liverpool suburb by a Jamaican father and a Scottish mother. It was probably a nice place to live, unless you happened to belong to the only interracial family in the village.

Then there was school. School didn't work for me. I didn't cope well with the sit-and-listen, remember-and-regurgitate style of teaching. To this day, I can only sit still for about 40 minutes before it feels as if my central nervous system might burst from my body and insist its existence be acknowledged. Such outbursts are, of course, what the education system deems "naughty" behaviour.