"Around the same time as The Slits, me and Antonia, when we met, we used to sing 'Vicious'. We were really little and were all ""waaa!"", nutty little girls running around, pretty funny - I doubt I'd want to have met us now! - but we thought we were hilarious. We used to listen to Transformer - he's just extraordinary. He was just fantastic, just grown up with him, so it's hard to find a way to describe exactly what he means to me. I found a book of his lyrics and you can read them and he's just the most extraordinary poet. He's someone else where you can just sit and read his words as much as you can listen to his songs. I met him once and he told me he thought I was a pretty good lyricist! It was one of the Leonard Cohen things that we did - we were sitting next to each other watching Antony [Hegarty] and we chatted and he said that. I always consider that quite a big moment in my life."

"Before I read Achebe as a child in Nigeria, I read only foreign children’s books, and so I wrote about the same things I was reading – all my characters were White and the stories were set in England or a generic Westernised country. I had not read books that featured people like me, so I thought that books couldn’t include people like me. Until I discovered Achebe. I didn’t realise it at the time, of course – I was too young to be consciously aware of that sort of thing – but later I would realise that reading Achebe was a turning point. It made me see that it was, in fact, possible for people of colour to exist within literature. Arrow of God has remained one of my favourite novels. Set in 1920s Igboland, it tells the story of a remarkable priest, Ezeulu, and a British administrator, and the ways in which colonialism brought not only political but cultural changes. It is funny and absorbing, moving and beautiful. I love this book."