I Can Write With Authority Only About

The Best Novels Are Those That Are Important Without Being Like Medicine; They Have Something To Say, Are Expansive And Intelligent But Never Forget To Be Entertaining And To Have Character And Emotion At Their Centre.

It Is Easy To Romanticize Poverty, To See Poor People As Inherently Lacking Agency And Will. It Is Easy To Strip Them Of Human Dignity, To Reduce Them To Objects Of Pity. This Has Never Been Clearer Than In The View Of Africa From The American Media, In Which We Are Shown Poverty And Conflicts Without Any Context.

The Educated Ones Leave, The Ones With The Potential To Right The Wrongs. They Leave The Weak Behind. The Tyrants Continue To Reign Because The Weak Cannot Resist. Do You Not See That It Is A Cycle? Who Will Break That Cycle?

I Think It's Important To Humanize History; Fiction Can Help Us Remember. A Lot Of Books I've Read In The Past Have Been So Much More Important Than Textbooks - There Is An Emotional Connection With One Particular Person. I'm Very Much Of A Research-is-important Type Of Fiction Writer, Even For Contemporary Fiction. I Wrote About Blogs In America And I've Never Blogged. But I Read Many, Many Blogs - Usually About Feminist Things, Or About Race, Or About Hair.

When We Realize That There Is Never A Single Story About Any Place, We Regain A Kind Of Paradise.