“I’ve gotten to try on voices very different than my own, and I’ve become much more aware of structure than ever before. Also, you really weigh every word. There’s no closer reading then when you read to translate.”

The legacy of the embargo will be Cuba’s poverty and desperation. When the island comes out of it, they’ll be even more desperate than they are now about the things they think they’ve missed.

Journalism is very much public writing, writing with an audience in mind, writing for publication, and frequently writing quickly.

This is going to sound nuts but it took me forever to figure out why I’d stopped writing poetry – I mean, I went about a decade where I wrote very little poetry and I thought it was because I was doing a weekly blog.

Fiction lies somewhere in between. I usually start intuitively but eventually I need to stop and consider structure, or research, or both.

In journalism, if there’s a hole in your story you figure out a way around it because you’ve got a 4 p.m. deadline.

We’re a long way from the embargo ending. Look at what just happened with the rollback of Obama’s Cuba policies. Two idiot congressmen convinced our idiot president to make it harder on Cubans on the island.

Each genre has its own process. I’m very intuitive about poetry. I usually write first and second drafts out by hand. The other end of the spectrum is journalism, which is much more cerebral, more thought-out and planned.

I think one of the unintended results of the embargo is that Cuba is quite consumerist – and I’m talking about the people, not the government or the official propaganda.

So much depends on our health, and we tend to take it so for granted.

Interestingly, in Cuba abortion is treated as lightly as getting a mole removed.

And then when we moved, I reconfigured my writing desk. The previous one had had very little space to write by hand. And suddenly, the poetry was gushing!

I feel possessive about stories I write in Spanish and so I usually end up translating those into English myself.

Offspring were a joy or a shame, but still the crown of their elders, nature’s unpredictable creatures.

I’m never afraid of research. I relish it!

I tell people to have a relationship with their work every day, even if it means you just move a comma.

And I know that when I worked daily journalism it really affected my patience with literature, which I think requires reflection, and a different kind of engagement.

A more immediate wrong is the way the movement for a fuller, freer life for all human beings is hampered.

I have always been more interested in creating a character that contains something crippled. I think nearly all of us have some kind of defect.

Being an outsider at all times is both unhealthy and useful, because you become much more objective about things.

All of us in Parliament now have a responsibility to get on with the process of leaving the EU and securing a more prosperous future for Britain as an open, global, trading nation.

I think growing up the way I did has made me a lot more objective, and that’s important in the process of writing and trying to look at subjective matter that way.

The weak are more likely to make the strong weak than the strong are likely to make the weak strong.

Leaving the European Union really does give us a chance as a country to become more outward-looking, to become more competitive, and to deepen our links with our partners right across the world.

The theory that the man who raises corn does a more important piece of work than the woman who makes it into bread is absurd.