I’ve always wanted to be a writer, and have been writing for as long as I can remember. My youthful efforts were unremarkable – I started with rabbits and progressed to pet jackdaws. I did write a story about the origin of Easter eggs which won me a packet of Cadbury’s creme eggs. I did enjoy them but I can’t remember anything about the story. I spent a lot of time writing and not finishing things. I’ve always been a voracious reader, and I still am. I’d recommend anyone who wants to be a writer to read a lot. You learn so much.

The first book I got published was a novel based on my grandmother’s life in Nazi Germany, Mourning Is Not Permitted. Then I wrote a novel about a woman in the seventeenth century who was hanged as a witch, Malefice, and after that The Mountain of Immoderate Desires, which is set in nineteenth-century Hong Kong. I won the Southern Arts prize for fiction for that one.

Effi arrived in a story I wrote years ago for my children, about a child who’d escaped from a circus where she was a virtual slave, who went on a journey with a group of other characters in a fantasy country. She started as a child who had to rely on her own wits, and she was always associated with a journey.

The other seed of Kummersdorf was a workshop I did at St Joseph’s school, Reading, where I asked the girls to imagine that they were a German child whose Jewish ex-schoolmate suddenly turned up and asked for help. The idea of two children from completely different Germanies caught at my imagination, and in the end I realised I had to write the story myself. But I decided not to make her Jewish, because there are so many excellent stories about Jewish children at that period, but none that I know of in English about non-Jewish German children, and I think their story also needs to be told.