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I am a voracious reader, so it's difficult for me to give a list of my favourite authors of all time.

Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both.

I love Dickens because it makes me chuckle to myself so. He has taken me to another world and out of so many earthly miseries.

I have so many favorite authors; I can't name just one.

Dickens is a very underrated writer at the moment. Everyone in his time admired him but I think right now he's not spoken of enough.

I love Dickens. I love the way he sets a scene.

I don't think I have one particular favourite writer. I have many whose works I will always buy or reread - Muriel Spark, Anthony Powell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ruth Rendell, James Ellroy, William McIlvanney, Kate Atkinson, John Burnside, Louise Welsh, Iain Banks.

I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.

I'm totally obsessed with Dickens, and 'Great Expectations' was one of the first book's I read when I was still in school in Porthcawl.