Sometimes humour allows you to tackle subjects which would otherwise be so grim and unpleasant that people would not want to read about them. I can sympathise with this attitude, because I personally try to avoid violent films; I duck down behind the seat to avoid watching something very bloody. Yet humour allows you to keep your reader’s sympathy for the characters, so they carry on reading. But I think the real reason I write in a humorous way is more to do with my personality. I tend to see the funny side of things, and in every grisly situation there is usually something to laugh at. In fact that laughter in the face of horror is one of the things which keeps us going and reminds us that we are human.

I grew up speaking Ukrainian at home, but I learnt English as soon as I went to school. But I was not taught English – I learnt by listening; and that habit of listening to how people speak is something I have carried through with me to adult life. I love to eavesdrop on people’s conversations – they say the most crazy things! English is a wonderfully flexible and tolerant language – it is amazing how you can mangle it, and still be understood. That’s something I like to experiment with, and in the case of Emmanuel I wanted to push it to its limit and write a kind of poetry out of bad English.

When I started to write A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, I knew I had a good story, and I wanted to make the voice confessional, gossipy, and a bit bitchy – just the way I talk when I’m with my women friends. Finding the right voice for Two Caravans was much more difficult. I thought at first of telling it through the voice of one all-seeing narrator, but that was quite deadly, and I realized that to bring the story to life, I had to go inside the characters. Although only Irina has a first person voice, all the characters take turns at taking the narrative forward, and describing what they see through their own eyes. In fact there is another first person narrator – Dog. But instead of seeigng the world through his eyes, we smell it through his nose.

Yes, I did take a risk with Dog, and I’ve had some fierce comments from the critics, who couldn’t really understand why I should want to do this. But readers have been much more sympathetic, and often people come up to me and say in a whisper ‘I loved the dog!’ Actually, I’m not particularly a dog lover – I usually prefer cats – but Dog is based on a real dog who belonged to a friend of mine, and we would go walking with him in the Peak District South of Sheffield. Like Dog, he was a dog with a mystery – he had arrived late one night at my friend’s house with bleeding paws, covered in scratches, and starving hungry. He stayed with my friends, and refused to leave them. He was obviously running away from something – but he couldn’t tell us what. So as we walked with him, we tried to imagine his story; once I knew that my book as goign to be about people on the run, I knew that they would also have a dog who was on the run.

I love the countryside, and I like more than anything to be outdoors – not very good for a writer! But at least I can pretend I am gathering material when I walk in the hills or potter in my garden. I love the changing seasons and the changing skies, and it’s such a pleasure to try and recreate some of those images in words. Nature changes much more slowly than the human world, so it’s reassuring that whatever is happening in the human world, at least the sky and the trees remain the same; though of course now with global warming changes in nature are much more noticeable and worrying. That’s something I would like to write about in future.

I am quite interested in vehicles. They seem to epitomize both human endeavour and human failure. I suppose it must come from my father, who had a long love affair with his motorbikes, and also talked passionately about tractors and lorries, as though they were human. I don’t have any great interest in modern cars, only old characterful ones, and of course I’ve had many ancient, unreliable but characterful vehicles myself. But none as spectacularly ancient and unreliable as the ones I saw in Ukraine. Once, we drove to visit a cousin in an old Zaphorozhets – the same car that Andriy had – but it had no passenger seat, so the person who sat in front had to perch on a wooden stool. There was no road, so we cut straight across the fields, and the car bounced up and down like a frog. Then a storm broke – lashing rain and the sky split with lightning. The windscreen wipers didn’t work, but still the little car bounced on through the long wet grass, and at last we arrived at my cousin’s house. But I wouldn’t put that vehicle in a book – no one would believe it!

It’s always a challenge to bring together the personal past and the historical past, but I’m going to attempt that in my next book, which looks both at personal relationships and at the Arab-Israeli conflict. It’s a very ambitious idea, and it may change as I go along, so I don’t want to promise too much, in case I decide to change it all. I’m very concerned to situate my books in the present world that we live in, and for the contemporary world to be present in my books, but of course the present is the way it is because of what went before. As an author of fiction, you can write about these ancient and intractable problems without feeling compelled to find a solution to the political or moral dilemmas; all that you can do is to find the truth about human beings, and often those human truths remain constant throughout history.

I think maybe I’m the wrong person to give advice; after all I’ve been writing since I was four years old, and it wasn’t until I was 58 that I got published. So I suppose the first piece of advice is not to give up – but even more important is to get started. Many people dream of vecomming a writer, but never actually get anything down on paper. It’s not until you start experimenting with writing that you realize just how hard it is – and how many problems there are to be solved even in a quite starighforward narrative. I always rewrite everything – sometimes twenty or thirty times, until I am satisfied. But you can’t rewrite something which isn’t written in the first place. So, get started, keep going, and, my third piece of advice is – go on a course.

My breakthrough came when I attended a course in creative writing at the university where I work – it was part of the staff development programme. What I learnt was fairly useful, but the most useful things were the discipline of producing a certain number of words every week, and allowing myself to admit to being serious about writing. A course will also help you to get over the embarrassment of showing your writing to other people. If you don’t want to show it to people, it’s because you know, at some deep level, that there’s something embarrassing about it. For me, humour was the way of getting over that embarrassment.

But the most valuable thing about my writing course is that it brought me to the attention of a literary agent, who was the external examiner on the course, and offered to take me on. Whereas I had submitted manuscripts to publishers without success, he had no trouble in finding a publisher for me.