Excellent feature by Damian Whitworth
She has never run with the pack. For a year, at the age of 10, she was bullied at school. "I had a disastrously short haircut so they called me Cave Boy. It was a year of utter misery." Eventually her chief tormentor left but the experience informed the character of the outsider Torak. She also realised "that I could live in books and get through. I just ignored everybody else. The imaginary world became my support".As a teenager "I wasn't happy. No big reason -- I was just an overweight, spotty teenager." She devoured Norse and Greek myths, then the classics. "I was clever. I was reading Dostoevsky and my schoolfriends weren't. So I was thinking 'you are idiots' and my parents were idiots because they watched television."
At Oxford, where she achieved a first in biochemistry, she had "a lovely time but I didn't really make any friends and I didn't really want them. I enjoyed the work but I didn't go to any lectures. I spent most of my time trying to write novels. I was totally non-social. At Oxford you can do that -- I wasn't the weirdest one by any means."
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