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I was sent to a whites-only school. It was like being brought up to be a horse with blinkers. Luckily when I left school, I met people who challenged me… and I took off the blinkers.

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I became very angry about the terrible things that I could now see. You can read more in FAQs. I started writing later — in exile in England. Thousands of children were reading the book around the world but the apartheid government refused to let South African children read it until , the year after Nelson Mandela was released from jail.

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Each novel is a new journey. I throw huge challenges across the paths of my characters. Imagine if your father, a journalist, wrote the truth about a bullying dictator. Imagine gunmen are sent to silence him and your mother is shot instead. What if you have to be smuggled out of your country for safety? This was the first time in 64 years that a book with African characters had taken the prize!

Being a novelist is a bit like being a long distance runner. They are windows to other worlds.