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England gave me a language and literature, the basis of what I am as a writer, but when I started writing more directly about my own experience, it wasn't England so much as what went before.

The really successful work in England tends to be working-class writers telling working-class stories. The film industry has been slow to wake up to that, for a variety of reasons. It still shocks me how few films are written or made in England about working-class life, given that those are the people who go to movies.

I had never read Victorian novels before going overseas. I read a handful of authors, but I had not immersed myself in the literature of the 19th century.

I grew up in a very British family who had been transplanted to Canada, and my grandmother's house was filled with English books. I was a very early reader, so I was really brought up being surrounded with piles of British books and British newspapers, British magazines. I developed a really great love of England.

I never expected to earn money out of writing. In fact, the idea of getting published was too bourgeois. Then, in England, I realised that writing a book was something you could do without it being laughable.

If I'd stayed on in London and carried on going to literary parties, it would have wrecked me as a writer.

I had started writing as a poet in a closed, post-Revival, claustrophobic world, where the shadows of the national upheaval and the intense effort - the intense self-conscious effort - to make a literary movement were still evident. Now we lived a life as writers that was more cosmopolitan, more open, that had more travel and exchange.

Basically, particularly in Britain, it's a hegemonic thing that people who write tend to come from the leisure classes. They can afford the time and the books.

It's only a drawback in the States, where most people seem to have no real interest in other countries and the notion of a novel which might offer insight into life in the UK doesn't seem to appeal very widely.