Ever noticed how Tom Sturridge always plays the bad boy? He was Captain Francis Troy in David Nicholls’ amazing adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd, Jake in the Starz adaptation of Sweetbitter, and in the incredible biopic about Mary Shelley that came out last year, he played the original Bad Boy of Literature, Lord Byron.  One of…

The other day, when I gave my Grandma and Grandpa their early copy of Well-Behaved Women, I found myself apologising for all the bad words I had used.  It’s not that I’ve used gratuitous swearing or offensive slurs or anything like that. It’s just that this is how my characters talk. Words like ‘fuck’ are part…

There’s a lot of music in my stories. Contemporary music, the stuff I listen to when I’m writing now like Josh Pyke and the sweet-edged dark bands of my teenaged years like Fall Out Boy, has certainly had an effect on my writing, and if you read closely you might even find some echoes of…