Where did you grow up, and how did this influence your writing?
I was born in England and when I was nine, my parents immigrated to New Zealand. Life was difficult for children who were from immigrant families, especially at first because other children did not accept your differences. At that time, there were also many European families who had settled and those children had the difficulties of language as well.
The area my parents first settled in was predominantly Maori and they had different cultural aspects from the other New Zealanders and from what the government of that time expected. In some respects, those children also had to find their way between two ways of living and sometimes two languages.
Those early experiences have allowed me to share in some of the difficulties when one is "an outsider" and the time and effort required to become accepted.
When did you first start writing?
At school. I wrote serial stories when was ten and read them each morning to the class. But those were never kept. I wrote a few poems which I kept in a special book, just for me. They were my secret thoughts. The two novels began as stories I had drafted when I was a teenager.
Read more of this interview.