Liz Fenwick: “I wanted stories to continue when I was a child”

Liz Fenwick, a writer based in Dubai, talks about her passion for writing and favourite books.

Q: What inspired you to write?

“I wanted stories to continue when I was a child. At first I continued them in my head, but once I could write, I began to put my ideas down on paper. Eventually my imagination took full charge of the stories in my head creating new ones.”

Q: Which is the one book that changed your life?

“That is a really hard question. I read Maeve Binchey’s Light A Penny Candle in 1983 and I had the moment of ‘it is the type of book I want to write’ so it changed my writing goals. But, I would have to say that The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho came into my hands at a time when I needed it to. Now when I’m down I pick it up to remind me that the universe does give us a hand if we allow it to.”

Q: What’s the one phrase from a book you read, that stands out in your memory?

“It has to be the opening line of Amin Maaloof’s Leo The African…: ‘I, Hassan the son of Muhammad the weigh-master, I, Jean-Leon de Medici, circumcised at the hand of a barber and baptised at the hand of a pope, I am now called the African, but I am not from Africa, nor from Europe…”

Q: Is there any author who has greatly inspired you?

“There are many. Certainly Maeve Binchy in the way that she understands character and I could say the same for Jane Austen. I loved Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as a child and that sense of adventure and discovery that Mark Twain so beautifully captured has stayed with me.”

Q: Which 10 books would you recommend that everyone read?

“Certainly Leo the African by Amin Maaloof, Any Human Heart by William Boyd, Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne DuMaurier, Not Forgetting the Whale by John Ironmonger, Life After Life by Kate Atkinson and The Last Act of Love by Cathy Rentzenbrink.”

— The author will be a part of the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature 2016, which will be held in Dubai from March 1 - 12.