As a small child I responded above all to the mood and colour of things: the yellow of my boiled egg, the hard-baked blueness of an Australian winter sky, the mud-grey shimmer of the lizard outside my Grandma’s kitchen. It was at the breakfast table that I discovered the checkered world of human emotion: my father, the hot-tempered, rational scientist, my mother the dreamy housewife-philosopher, and the mystery of my older sister – quiet, fragile, artistic.

Like my sister, I felt happiest in my own world of images; though in my case, attempts to recreate them invariably produced an expanse of greenish-brown paint across the sugar paper and a disappointed teacher. Instead, I found words. Words that could be used, misused, enjoyed for their sounds and rhythms, words to denote something rich or particular and others that were able to bend or shift in meaning. ‘Chatty’, ‘loquacious’, ‘can’t stop talking’, my school reports said year after year. But with all my shaggy outpourings, I longed to put them into some kind of order.

Drawing inspiration from Grimms Tales, Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf and Emil and the Detectives, I made my own books out of scrap paper that I filled with news pieces and stories about lions escaping from the zoo, girls who went shopping for worms and flip-flops, objects that came to life and got into sticky situations. Alongside the story-writing, learning to connect with others played a vital role in helping me make sense of things. Getting to know the personalities – those unique bundles of fear and desire – in the playground (who liked to play rough or use rude words, who was willing to share their skipping rope or ball) was, I learnt, not only a key to survival but riveting too.

Years down the line, it is all those words and all those people who I know and love – as well as those I am yet to meet – that bind me to the world; and to craft a story out of real-life is what makes my heart beat faster.