I fell in love with fiction from the moment I learned to read – rather late. I devoured CS Lewis, E Nesbitt, Louisa Alcott, Noel Streatfield, and all my brothers’ books. At secondary school, instead of working, I read Penelope Mortimer, Margaret Drabble, Nell Dunn, Doris Lessing, Edna O’Brien, Muriel Spark, Beryl Bainbridge, Jean Rhys. They revealed that women can write the best of modern fiction and this informed my years working on the Virago Modern Classics. Also as a teenager I read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and my world turned on its axis. It’s hardly surprising I failed to get into university, but I did become an editor (and have two Hon DLitts). In my 45 years in publishing, two of my great pleasures have been publishing from across the globe and working with first-time writers. Those I started on their writing journeys include Lucy Ellmann, Elspeth Barker, Tim Pears, Esther Freud, Helen Oyeyemi, Emma Donoghue and Kamila Shamsie. I also love helping people to write memoir as there’s nothing so entrancing as a life story.

I am a converted non-fiction junkie and still surprised by that fact, so strong was my ardour for fiction. I grew up on a diet of Agatha Christie, Henry James, and post-colonial African literature, and didn't read any non-fiction outside of academia until I was well into my 30s. Then I picked up Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and The Road to 9/11, or more accurately was given it by someone appalled by my disregard for non-fiction, and confident the book would change my mind. They were right. What followed is a love affair with non-fiction that teaches you about the world while telling a page-turning story, and a writing career of non-fiction political essays and books that my younger self absolutely would not have read, but definitely should have. I now see everything as storytelling, whatever the genre, and in my own work, as well that I love to read, I reach for writing that reveals as well as entertains.

I'm passionate about storytelling on the page and the screen, and fascinated by the mechanics and method behind it. I started out as a historian, inspired by the humour and levity of Thackeray's The Four Georges, and by the purpose and narrative drive of CLR James's The Black Jacobins. Though fiction and nonfiction have different purposes and aims, I believe strongly that the fundamentals of storytelling inform them equally. When I wrote my first book, Indian Summer, a history of the end of empire and partition in India and Pakistan, I learned how to structure longform by obsessively watching Buffy The Vampire Slayer. I adore writers in any genre or medium who combine sharp storytelling with a keen wit and humanity, including JG Farrell, Octavia E Butler, Nora Ephron, Billy Wilder, William Goldman, James Baldwin, and Graham Greene.

I didn’t care for books for many years, partly on account of receiving three copies of Jane Eyre from different relatives on my ninth birthday. Being from the third world came with an obligation to delve into suffering in literature, which I always found suffocating and besides I preferred cinema – could a book conceivably be as scintillating as Cary Grant in a well-cut suit? And then I found Noel Coward in the school library – as screamingly funny and chic as all my Hollywood idols. I still love writers with wit, with fangs aimed largely at themselves, telling big brutal truths like my favourites Hanif Kureishi, Dorothy Parker, Jean Rhys, Shehan Karunatilaka, and Bret Easton Ellis. As an editor, I am especially interested in developing satire with a diverse outlook – normal lives even for us – and I adore trailblazers in this field such as Terry McMillan, author of Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Kevin Kwan who parsed Singapore's elite in Crazy Rich Asians and Raja al-Sanea, who laid bare the social and sexual mores of the Saudi elite in Girls of Riyadh, a region I am absolutely desperate to see more writing from.