Christine Leunens

My first novel was a critical success in a matter of weeks.

A woman's relationship with her son is psychological, emotional, even physical.

People feel very ashamed to admit that they have in-law problems. They think it's something petty. But it's not petty at all. It hits deep emotions.

However, for my characters to have depth, they have to be human and complex, have both qualities and flaws, do the right things at times, and at others, things they'll regret having done and not necessarily know how to undo.

The themes that I explore, Taika Waititi also explores: how teaching children a sense of 'us and them' breeds a sense of superiority and dehumanises what one perceives as 'otherness'; and why this theme is relevant to today's rise in the far-Right, how children and youth are indoctrinated into extremism and terrorism.

Be true to yourself, pick something that really matters to them and is dear to them.

Write something and leave it aside so you've practically forgotten it as much as possible, a month or so, then come back and read it as if you're reading it for the first time.

Because I write just at home, I'm just in my T-shirt and sneakers all the time.

As a writer, I'm mostly at my desk, staring out my window. No one sees me.

I think what happens is when you have fear, fear translates into hatred.

Looking back, I can't say I got any real satisfaction from so many people being interested in what I looked like.

I don't feel pride when I look at a magazine spread I did for Vogue, but writing is really satisfying to me. I can go so deep into people's interior lives, slowly and with complexity, over years and years sometimes. That's very rewarding, in a way that modelling never was.

I was born 20 years after World War II had ended, and people of my generation mostly thought of it as a terrible period portrayed in documentaries you'd seen, flickering, in black and white.

It's not ideal when art is seen as just some passing entertainment quickly thrown out into the market, like a consumer object. You have to let things settle and think about them.

Then it's very easy to point fingers at other people and use this kind of rhetoric, infestation and comparing people to rodents, insects, showing them as very undesirable people - not people who feel the same, who care about their families too, no, but as people who are different and less human, to dehumanize them.

I wanted to really just understand... how could a whole generation of children who were just children at the time - boys riding their bikes, flying kites, and doing all kinds of things they normally do - how could they suddenly be taught a completely different curriculum?

So I'm working on another historical novel. This one's a Franco-New Zealand novel, and it takes place at the time of the Rainbow Warrior bombing in New Zealand.