I was born in Aberdeen, in 1972, to two librarians who treated the act of reading as a kind of slow weather. There were, I am told, a number of seasonal floods and one minor explosion in the kitchen, none of which I remember and none of which, in any case, made it into the books.

I read English at Glasgow, taught it briefly and badly in Belfast, and have lived in Edinburgh since 2004 in a top-floor flat that, when the wind is from the east, sounds exactly like a paragraph being argued with.

My first novel, Marginalia, appeared in 2012, by accident and a sympathetic editor. There have been four others since, none of which I particularly meant to write. They have been kind enough to keep, on the whole, to themselves.

• Festival panels with the word “future” in the title.
• Photo shoots requiring a prop typewriter or a meaningful window.
• Quote my own work, even when asked twice.
• Comment on the contemporary novel as a category, and certainly not over wine.
• Use the word craft, except, regrettably, in this sentence.

• Read aloud, briefly, if the room is small and the lighting is forgiving.
• Reply to letters, in handwriting, eventually.
• Visit independent bookshops, and stay only as long as is decent.
• Speak to translators about the difficult sentences. There are not, it turns out, enough hours.