The comedian and children’s writer on the powerful impact of George Orwell, the ending of the Bible and laughing at Adrian Mole

The book I am currently reading
I’ve just finished Paris Lees’s coming-of-age memoir What It Feels Like for a Girl. It is so vivid, and the use of dialect so clever, that it feels as if you are living her life with her. Now I am on to Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men: the fictionalisation of real-life events, about a black man who was falsely accused of a murder in Wales in the 1950s and executed. I read every sentence in total awe.

The book that changed my life
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. I saw Sally Potter’s magnificent film first then had to read the novel. I think of it as a children’s book for grownups: a fantasy about a poet who lives for centuries and changes sex. It made me realise that, for a writer, the only parameter of fiction is your own imagination.