One Minute With: Mal Peet, young adult author & illustrator

Author Mal Peet (Tim Cuff/Apex News and Pictures)

Where are you now and what can you see?

At home in Devon. From one window I could just about see Dartmoor, if it weren’t raining. From another, a block of ‘‘sheltered accommodation’’ which I fondly call Ceausescu Towers.

What are you currently reading?

Tenth of December by George Saunders, a collection of wonderfully funny and disturbing short stories. I just read one called ‘Sticks’ and decided to give up writing. I’m also dipping into Jonathon Green’s Language! 500 Years of the Vulgar Tongue, which has something treasurable on every page. I just came across ‘Bum- trinket’, which I would have loved to slip into The Murdstone Trilogy.

Choose a favourite author and say why you admire him/her

Emily Dickinson. A quiet, religious spinster who somehow became a lightning conductor for shockingly beautiful imagery. I keep her Collected Poems on my desk at all times and go to her like a pilgrim when I’m stuck or stale. In one of the poems there’s the line ‘Necromancer! Landlord! Who are those men below?’ and for years I’ve been trying to come up with a story with that as the title.

Describe the room where you usually write

An attic room full of strewn papers, dead computers, improvised ashtrays and the quer- ulous murmuring of missed dead- lines. When I moved into it a few years ago I resolved to keep it Spartan and distraction-free. Now it’s like a charity shop.

Which fictional character most resembles you?

Sir John Falstaff. Or, if my wife is to be believed, Eeyore.

Who is you heroine/hero from outside literature?

Miles Davis. An angry beautiful genius who continuously reinvented himself and American music as soon as he/it became merely popular.

Mal Peet’s first adult fiction is ‘The Murdstone Trilogy’ (David Fickling)