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My 20s were a blizzard of rejection slips.

I have been rejected 120 times, probably because I didn't write the right book.

I like to joke that I probably hold the world record for rejection letters. Yes, the truth is that I was fed up of being rejected repeatedly, and self-publication was an act of defiance at traditional publishing. But life works in strange ways.

I was making a lot of momentous personal decisions. I was still very very young: when the prize was awarded, I was 33; the work I had done when I was 21.

If I went by all the rejection I've had in my career, I should have given up a long time ago.

My dad told me, 'It takes fifteen years to be an overnight success', and it took me seventeen and a half years.

I was signed at 18 and had to grow up quickly.

I started writing at the age of seventeen because I had a teacher in high school who said that we had to get something accepted by a national magazine to get an A. The teacher later withdrew that threat, but the writing bug bit me.

I took all of my rejection letters - there must have been thousands of them in a huge box - and I went out on the curb and burned them all, crying.