I was born in South Africa in 1959. My parents were both journalists, and decided that they didn't want to bring up a baby in a society dominated by racism. So they gave up their careers and left, taking a boat to Italy. We lived on the island of Capri for a year until the money ran out and they had to come to England to get jobs.

Once there, they scraped together enough money to buy a house in Primrose Hill, then a very run-down area of North London, which Dodie Smith made famous in '101 Dalmatians'. For children, it was paradise because we could run around the streets in a gang and go to the park. For wives and mothers it was in some cases less so. During my childhood in the early 1960s, there was an epidemic of suicides around Primrose Hill, including that of Sylvia Plath.

My parents escaped because James Cameron (rightly known as the patron saint of journalists) told my father of a job that was coming up at the UN in Rome. We left England when I was six. My parents kept their house and rented it out; one of their tenants was Fay Weldon, who was the first professional woman novelist I had come across, and the subject of intense fascination to me for years before we became friends.

I hated Italy at first. All the physical freedom I had enjoyed in London vanished, and English books were hard to come by, and expensive, so they were what I spent my pocket money on. I was delighted when I discovered all the Oz books, and those by Rider Haggard, E. Nesbit, and Tolkien because there's nothing worse than finding an author and not getting enough of them. I read both English classics and American ones, because many of the children I was at school with came form the US. Perhaps as a result, I do not feel particularly British, though my parents are a hotchpotch of different nationalities which also influenced me. The school I went to encouraged you to write little book reviews, so I started out as a critic - though I also wrote plays and got my friends to act them out. What I read most of all were fairy tales and myths, all of which later fed into my novels, especially In A Dark Wood.

Books became particularly important to me because for much of my childhood I was ill with asthma, spending days and even weeks in bed, struggling to breathe. The misery of this (especially in the days predating Ventolin, the arrival of which literally saved my life) was compounded by the fact that my asthma was entirely caused by my allergy to cats... and it was unthinkable for my mother, a great cat-lover, to be without our cat. I found that if I was distracted by a really good story, the asthma was more bearable, which is one reason why to this day I value plot as highly as I value style. To me, a storyteller is a kind of magician, and the books I particularly loved, such as the Narnia stories and those by Tolkien and Jane Austen, were literally an escape into another world where I could breathe. I now see a prolonged period of illness in childhood as being a blessing because inactivity, boredom and unhappiness are what help develop the imagination - even if they probably also make you less "normal".

The other very important aspect to my childhood was music. You can hear some of my reasons for this if you click on the BBC Radio 3 website for Private Passions after July 2003, but classical music was something that I was exposed to, on a fairly basic level, from the beginning, though it was not until I went to boarding school and discovered Radio 3 that it became an abiding love. Music is also something that helped me to breathe (particularly when I learned to sing), and to develop as a writer by showing me that strong feelings could be made tolerable and even beautiful when put into patterns and forms.

By this time, I had fallen passionately in love with the Italian countryside, particularly around Cortona in Tuscany, then it was as unknown as it was beautiful. Like Emma Kenward, in my first novel Foreign Bodies, I had my visual sense awakened by this, and taught myself to draw - though unlike her, I knew I wanted to write, not paint.

Then, once again, I had to leave. I was sent to board in England, at a progressive school called Bedales. Many, many British writers have suffered at boarding school, and I was no exception. Eventually, it formed the inspiration for my second novel, A Private Place, but it is thanks to Bedales that I realised most strongly that I wanted to become a novelist. You can read more about this in the section on A Private Place.

When I left school, I had won an Exhibition to read English at Clare College, Cambridge. Before going to university, I took nine months off for what is called a "Gap" year. I went at first to India to work for Mother Teresa in her House of the Dying in Calcutta, which was a profoundly strange and moving experience. When I returned to Italy I lived in and around Cortona for about six months, learnt fluent Italian from a boyfriend and tried to find my voice as a writer before going up to Cambridge.

University was a mixture of pleasure and disappointment. My college, Clare, had famously lovely gardens, and American graduates enlivened its student population but it was inward looking. During my time as an undergraduate I forgot that reading could be a pleasure; but the books I was obliged to read nevertheless formed a basis of knowledge for which I've been grateful all my life. I'd done some acting at school (and outside it) and so I continued with this for a while. My London boyfriend was the son of a well-known actor, and there were a number of very much more talented contemporaries such as Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry who went on to become the real thing. (I found this useful when I came to create Benedick of In a Dark Wood.) But I was also interested in journalism. I did a few theatre reviews for the student newspaper 'Stop Press', and later went in for the 'Vogue' Talent Contest.

In my second year, I fell in love with someone who has unfortunately cast a long shadow over my life. David Sexton, a Scholar at Trinity, was the only other person I came across at university who had read as much as I had. We shared a passion for Nabokov, then an obscure figure, and for aesthetics.

When I came to write my third novel, A Vicious Circle, fifteen years later, David Sexton nearly succeeded in getting it suppressed on the grounds that he claimed he was libelled as its villain. (You can read about this in the section on A Vicious Circle.) Like any number of student affairs it was a mixture of happiness and anguish: happiness at finding intellectual equality for the first time, anguish because of the natures of the people involved. One of us was always going to become a critic, the other, a novelist.

I emerged from this affair in London, the city that became my home, and took a job at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. I knew it would be many years before I could make a living as a writer, and thought that advertising would be more interesting than journalism. I shared the prejudices of those who believe journalism incompatible with fiction; and I was also influenced by the knowledge that many other modern novelists, such as Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and my parent's former tenant Fay Weldon, had also earned a living in this way.

However, I loathed the corruption of a world in which people worked on cigarette advertising knowing they caused lung cancer. I had entered the Vogue Talent Contest from university and been short-listed (though hadn't won) but I still didn't think of trying journalism. Instead I went to work for Terence Conran as PR for his design company. This, too, was not a happy experience. I was very poor, having run up large debts at university, and bicycled everywhere to save money. Like Mary in A Vicious Circle, I had only one pair of shoes for years, and my poverty became even greater when I was fired from my job and had to sign on for unemployment benefit.

However, I was also lucky. A friend of my family's helped me find a basement flat - in Primrose Hill, of all places. I had made some tentative friendships at Cambridge with people who now became a lifeline. Through one of these people, who later became godfather to our son, I met my husband, Rob.

He was then training to become a merchant banker, which seemed too good to be true. It was - the week we started going out together, he gave it up to study for a PhD. at the London School of Economics. He got a small grant, and I the dole, so we were both trying to live on a tiny amount of money. Rob was staying with his sister, a medical student who was living in a terrible council flat in the East End of London. Appalled by what I saw there, I used some of what I saw there for Grace in A Vicious Circle, but in the meantime, I was still writing my novel. It excited the interest of one editor at Chatto & Windus, who was promptly fired. In the meantime, the need to earn money was becoming increasingly pressing, so I thought of trying freelance journalism. My first article, for the Times, was accepted and was immediately taken up by another newspaper as controversial.

So began a secondary career that has been unexpectedly successful. Journalism is a different kind of writing to fiction, but I agree with Tom Wolfe about the need for novelists to encounter the world. I was lucky in discovering I could use a number of different "voices" for journalism, using it explore aspects of the world which then fed into my fiction. I won a couple of prizes - Young Journalist of the Year and the Catherine Pakenham Award - which should have helped but which each time got me fired from the staff jobs I had then. (The pieces were always written as a freelance because I wasn't allowed to write what I wanted.) The second time I won a prize, a leading literary agent approached me. She asked whether I had thought of writing a novel. Well yes - I had, of course, though I knew it wasn't quite right. I sent my novel to her, and she promptly lost it. It was the only copy. I couldn't afford the expense of photocopying it.

So I sat down and wrote it all over again, this time in the first person, and as I did so I realised that the agent had done me a favour. That novel became 'Foreign Bodies'. It was bought by Robyn Sisman at Random Century, later to become a successful romantic novelist herself, and a good friend.

'Foreign Bodies' was published in 1990 when I was 30. My reception on publication was not dissimilar from that of Adam in A Vicious Circle. I had entered, unwittingly, a world full of complex rules that nobody thought to explain. The chief of them is that any British journalist who writes a novel is seen as a target to be shot down in flames - especially if young and female. Although Foreign Bodies was short-listed for an award, and sold well, I was daunted. However, I wrote a new novel, A Private Place, in six months. It was published in 1991.

This time there was one difference. I had met Anthony Lane, who later became (and still is) the eminent film critic of The New Yorker but who was then deputy literary editor of The Independent. He asked me to review for him. I do not think it a coincidence that the one really intelligent review A Private Place received was in The Independent, but I was delighted because the reviewer had understood the most important thing about it.

I was writing satire. In 1990, women were not supposed to be doing this. Fay Weldon was just about allowed to because she was a famous feminist. I didn't know that I was breaking another taboo. What I did know was that, having begun to review fiction myself, I wanted to champion the kind of fiction I believe in - fiction of the kind utterly despised by the literary elite but which is actually the real avant-garde in requiring the mastery of the art of narrative.

I found a new agent, Giles Gordon, and a new publisher, Hamish Hamilton (Penguin). I also became pregnant with my first child. By the time Hamish Hamilton had signed up my third novel, A Vicious Circle, I was about to give birth.

I was also about to enter the most turbulent time of my life to date. My novel changed completely as a result of becoming a mother. The character of Amelia, the rich spoilt rival in love to poor Mary became altogether richer and more sympathetic, and the novel itself became as much about the transformations wrought by motherhood as about personal and professional revenge in the literary world.

By now, I was reviewing for several national newspapers and magazines, and the more I read the more appalled I became at the way good writers were cast down and bad ones raised up on the whim of a few powerful people who made fashion. Nevertheless, I realised that this was a wonderful subject to address in fiction.

In between two pregnancies and utter exhaustion because my two children were ill themselves and slept poorly, I wrote A Vicious Circle. I had some intermittent childcare, very little money and a raging fever most of the time. It took me almost four years. I finished it when my little son was two months old and my daughter nearly three.

By this time, my publisher at Hamish Hamilton had been sacked, and a new one appointed. This was Clare Alexander. Our relationship, at first cordial, rapidly disintegrated. You can read more about the process the novel went through in the section on A Vicious Circle. At the libel reading, she remarked to the Penguin in-house lawyer that there was no point in wasting any time checking my ms. since "nobody but a lunatic would want to claim to be this character".

How right she was - or how wrong. You can read more about this in the section on A Vicious Circle.

The literary content of A Vicious Circle was eventually realised by many, including some prominent reviewers, and gained the novel its reputation as a modern Dickensian novel about the rich and poor of London.

I do not write autobiography or romans a clefs, although as I have made clear, my novels grow out of personal incidents or experiences. What I had been through informed the writing of In a Dark Wood.

You can read more about In a Dark Wood and how I came to write it in the section on my novels. It was the most difficult of all my novels to write, even if Benedick's story (and affliction) is not my own. Each of my novels carries on characters from one book to the next, and each examines aspects of creativity. Of these, creativity and madness seem to me the most intriguing. I know how destructive suicide is because both my father's mother and his aunt killed themselves. The families of suicides are marked by it for generations, yet what also interests me is how people survive this legacy.

The fairy-tales intertwined with the novel were loved by a number of parents and children, and this led me to fulfil a promise I'd made to my daughter to write a children's novel next. I am currently finishing 'The Witch King', a novel for 8-12 year olds about magic, wolves and The North.

However, half-way through The Witchking, at a point when the hero, Will, is saved from arrest by some travelling players, I had an idea for a new adult novel, Love in Idleness. It sprang into my mind as a romantic comedy set in Tuscany while I was watching A Midsummer Night's Dream in Regent's Park Open Air Theatre with my children, in the summer of 2001. Another novelist has always called them Puck and Titania, and I suddenly saw how children could, like the fairies interfere in the romantic arrangements of a group of adults on holiday - right down to brewing a real love-potion! You can read more about Love in Idleness, which is being simultaneously published in July by LittleBrown UK and by Nan A. Talese at Doubleday USA in the novels section. Meanwhile, I am back finishing The Witchking. It features talking wolves, a small dragon, a deadly quest - and children who can do magic....