The author and podcaster on taking inspiration from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, welling up to Charles Dickens, and the enduring appeal of Jane Austen

My earliest reading memory
At a secondhand book sale at school, a kind teacher recommended my mum buy Brian Jacques’s Redwall. Noble monastic mice battle thuggish rats: catnip for a seven-year-old.

My favourite book growing up
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The mad robots and two-headed aliens are great for the teenage brain, but beneath all that is the sadness, and the questions about why life has to be like this, all filtered through poor Arthur Dent. I sometimes pull it off the shelf to read half a page, just to remind myself how comedy writing is done.