Cirrus@Austlit

'When I first decided I was going to be a writer, at around the age of ten, I wanted to be a fantasy writer and a poet. My mother still has my first folder of poems, carefully typed out like a proper book complete with a contents page. My first attempt at a novel was a ham-fisted copy of The Lord of the Rings. i wrote about a hundred pages by hand in my new black fountain pen, which I subsequently threw out as embarrassing juvenilia at the lofty age of fourteen.' (Introduction)