My obsession with place and travel started in childhood, with adventure and wilderness stories like 'The Call of the Wild', and Pushkin's verse-novel 'Evgenii Onegin' set in tsarist Russia. I gradually realiseld that travel is as much to do with time as with space, and in that sense, you could say that stories and poems about anything other than where and who we are at a given moment is travel writing of sorts.
In my teens, circumstances - such as the fall of the Berlin Wall - conspired to make me a migrant and a traveller. This has fuelled my own writing and my enduring fascination with literature which explores real and imaginary places, movement, belonging, and how all of this shapes our cultural and personal identity.