Manu : My sister introduced me to reading on a sustained basis when I was about nine or ten, and by my early teens I was writing some (terrible) poetry. I remember doing a “fantasy” novel and inflicting it in my family when I was around twelve, and a couple of short stories when I was still in school. But it took me some more years, till I was about nineteen or twenty, to really start writing in a serious, intelligent fashion. That is what culminated in my first book six years later.

Manu : I read a great deal of narrative non-fiction because my writing, at the moment, is all non-fiction. In terms of favourites, there are far too many to name and I really cannot think of one that triumphs over others. At the moment I am reading Lyndal Roper’s Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet.