Alexander McCall Smith

But some of the poems move me so much and continue to move me on the nth reading of them.

His poem In Memory of Sigmund Freud...

is one such.

He wrote that shortly after Auden had gone to live in the United States and Freud died in 1939 or whenever it was.

It's just a beautiful tribute to the liberating power of psychology and understanding what it is that might be wrong with our lives.

Well, that's very interesting.

Mara Matsui came to my mind having met Botswana women like her and wanting to write about them.

But I suppose she has literary antecedents.

I think those novels probably come mostly from my reading of an Indian writer, R.K.

Narayan.

I'm a great fan of R.K.

Narayan's work.

He started to write in English for a Western audience in the 1930s, at a time when other Indian writers really weren't doing that.

So he blazed the trail for the subsequent wonderful crop of novels set in India by Indian writers that we've enjoyed since then.

He really was the leader of that.

And I think his Malgudi novels, which are about small-town India and the concerns of various people leading their lives in those towns, and in particular a town that he invented called Malgudi, I think that made a distinct impression on me.

And that, I think, was a major influence in the Maramotsvi novels, although there was one very specific other influence which made me...

write or prompted me to write about women, because quite a few of the protagonists of my novels, indeed my major protagonists, are women.

And that was a book by Brianne Moore, an Irish writer, who went on to live in Canada and then subsequently the United States, called The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearn.

which was a magnificent book.