My BBC global podcast series, No Place but the Water, just dropped on Audible and I’m thinking again how difficult it is to write about climate change. A couple of years ago, I asked my son what his favourite climate-change story was and he said ‘Interstellar’ by Christopher Nolan, which actually is kind of driven by climate change, but is essentially a story about the preciousness and loss of time and the consequences of that on a father and his daughter. I asked my daughter

Why writing across forms and genres can kick open everything. I’m accidentally genre-fluid. Started out a playwright, lucky break. Early twenties. Wrote a play and a novel simultaneously, both out of the back of my head without knowing anything and the play had a life and the novel didn’t. So I set off writing for the theatre. Wrote a couple of plays for young people, made youth theatre in Scunthorpe, then a hip-hop musical (I wrote the story and words lol), probably one of t

And find a way to construct a map that helped me get to there . John Irving said he never started any novel without knowing the final sentence of it. That kind of blows my mind. I certainly don’t know the last sentence of a new piece of work, but these days I have a pretty good idea what happens when I get there. Of where I want the novel or play to finish. I have a map and I have got a rough journey of how to get to the destination. But the stuff in between is where it all g

What novels would we never write? I love Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’ so much, I’m still tweaking my adaptation which will go live at the London Library next month. Woolf feels so contemporary. Asks the big questions. When I read her, I always feel that challenge as a writer as if she still whispers in my head: “Wake up.” She asks this brilliant question in Room as she weighs the history of women writing (or not writing) and what they wrote: What if men were only re