My answer to this has changed over time, and has, at one point or another been John Irving’s World According to Garp, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Maggie Gee’s The White Family, but right now, the book I wish I had written is Being Dead by Jim Crace.

The very idea of a book about two corpses rotting on a stretch of coastline is audacious and seemingly macabre at first, yet the book soon reveals itself to be a truly beautiful meditation on the nature of death, love and marriage. Add to that an impressive use of structure and language and some wonderfully well realized characters and you get some idea of why I would be happy writing something even half as good as this novel.

John Irving’s The World According to Garp was the book that really turned me on to writing.

The depiction of Garp and his family is utterly convincing, while Irving’s exploration of the nature of fiction writing is something I still return to every so often. What I also find interesting, looking back on my first reading of this book, is how the themes of the book, writing, family, marriage and the relationship of a father with his children, resonated with my twenty year old self, while now they are some of the very things I attempt to deal with in my stories.

In the book, Garp answers a question regarding which bits of his books are true with another question, ‘Which bits did you like?’ The idea that the ‘true’ bits of any fiction are those that resonate with a reader struck a nerve with me, made me want to generate fiction that made the reader think and feel too.

My prose fiction tends to focus on relationships, particularly those between close family members. A great deal of my short fiction has touched on the themes of grief, love, marriage and a novel-in-progress I have been planning for a while now features all of these themes and is a story of three generation of men in the same family. I suppose it is no surprise, being father to two amazing young boys, that I should want to write about father-son relationships. Losing my father to cancer nearly ten years ago has also had an impact on my fiction.

That said, I also enjoy writing sci-fi and urban horror. I spent a great deal of time writing comic scripts in my late teens and twenties. These tended towards more sci-fi and supernatural stories.

I am currently working on a hyper-violent, hyper-satire with long time small press collaborator of mine, artist Chris Askham. These comic stories provide a nice change of pace. Sometimes I just want to write a big fight scene between super-intelligent gorillas and giant robots.

I don’t write for a living. One day, with luck.

My day job is full-time home dad to two young sons, with baby three due to make an appearance in the middle of June this year. I feel very lucky to be able to stay home and care for my boys, an opportunity afforded me through my wife’s commitment to her teaching career.

I may not have all day to write, but I can use the time spent sorting washing and cleaning the house to think out the issues and ideas for my stories. My family are used to me scrabbling for a notebook at random moments.

Best time to write when a homedad? A toss up between when the kids are at school/nursery and naptime – my youngest’s naptime, not mine.

My favourite short story is Beg, Sl Tog, Inc, Cont, Rep by Amy Hempel.

Chuck Palahniuk heaped high praise on Amy Hempel’s short fiction, warning that she will break your heart. I defy anyone with a beating heart not to feel shattered at the end of this story.

Even more amazing that she manages this in a story about knitting. Except, like all of her stories, the story isn’t just about what it is about.

My first answer to this question was going to be Amy Hempel’s collected stories, all of them. Honestly, pick up anything of hers and you are guaranteed a master class in how to use the short fiction form. Her writing really lives up to the aphorism that great writing is the best possible words in the best possible order.