I started the Obernewtyn Chronicles at fourteen, which is a pretty stormy age, partly to think about whether I could believe that the ultimate lesson would enable us to evolve ethically and morally as a race, and partly to think about my own place in the world, because I was a bit of a misfit. The main character is a girl only a little younger than I was when I started to write the first book. She lives after a nuclear holocaust and possesses forbidden abilities such as being able to talk telepathically to animals. Like me, she is a Misfit, and like me she was trying to figure out how to belong and yet be herself. I think that is why I was able to write and rewrite the book for so long without showing anyone before I finally sent it off to a publisher, because it was a place where I could think about things that really mattered to me. My own Room of Requirement.

You’ve been writing since you were a teenager. Has your approach to writing changed over that period?

In some ways, no. I started out writing like I was flinging myself down a steep slope on skis, half terrified and half thrilled to be negotiating unknown terrain, and knowing the run might be too tough for me.

That made sense when I was fourteen and writing in the midst of a tempestuous relationship with my mother, seven wild siblings, and no one felt writing had much to do with anything. The important things were getting everyone fed and bathed and so on, and keeping the house clean. We played a lot of games where I was basically making up stories, but that felt like a whole other thing. The writing was always this private slightly manic activity where I would work like hell because at any minute I was going to be interrupted. It was like reading a terrifically exciting book when you were being interrupted every other minute. A bit of me was always stitched into the book, so that I could go back to it in a second. Story was like this river that flowed through my mind, to which I always returned, and its glitter and its soft rushing sounds were always audible, visible, there – just under real life.

I was always just a little bit distracted from reality.