I write books for children and lecture in European Studies at The Hague University of Applied Sciences. The two go together better than they look. Both are mostly a matter of working with something powerful that will not do as it is told.

My first novel, Om Shanti, Babe, won the Frances Lincoln Diverse Voices Award and was published in 2012. I have a PhD in creative writing; the research was on who raises children in children's books when their own parents can't, which turns out to be almost everyone else in the village. I taught for some years on the MA in Creative Writing at Newcastle University, then left children's-literature research for a while, and have recently come back to it by a side door.

The side door is ai. For the past year I have been writing about what children's books know about living and working with a powerful non-human — a sentence that reliably empties a room. The ai conversation is mostly run by people young enough to be my grandchildren, who understand the machinery in ways I never will. But the question they ask least — how do you get along with something that doesn't think like you? — is one children's books have been asking for a century, and answering rather well.

I write about it on Substack. My daughter thinks I don't sleep enough, and has bought me a ring that tells me so every morning. I wear it.