Apart from a small minority, teenage boys fall into three distinct categories: macho, metro, or just plain muddled.

My school is very good and quite understanding and know I have to take time off for interviews or writers' festivals.

I was the kind of kid who was always making up stories and adventures.

The South is full of memories and ghosts of the past. For me, it is the most inspiring place to write, from William Faulkner's haunted antebellum home to the banks of the Mississippi to the wind that whispers through the cotton fields.

For me, family comes over and above everything.

When people ask me where I'm from, I say I'm from the Sudan. But when they ask what my hometown is, I say London. It's where I lived, and it's where my whole family lived.

TV family sitcoms have always been about fathers who know best and mothers who are so enchanted with everything they do. I wanted to be the first mom to be a mom on TV. I wanted to sent out a message about how us women really feel.

For years following the death of my mother, I wanted to write about her. I started writing what I thought of as personal essays about growing up as her child, but I never could finish any of them. I think I was too close to that loss, and too eager to try and resolve things, to make her death make sense.