WM: Your local library – in Torridon Road, Catford – played an important role in your love of books as you grew up. How do you feel about threats to libraries today?

LM: The whole austerity programme is a lie and an absolute shame on this government. To take away one of the last few places where people can go for peace, shelter, entertainment, education and a million other things without needing to spend money is the worst aspect of it.

WM: In Bookworm you paint yourself as a shy loner – ‘bookish, inert, unsociable’. How did you change from being so introverted to becoming a journalist at the Guardian and speaking in public?

LM: You don’t have to be an extrovert to be a journalist (at least the non-investigative kind) and I don’t do much public speaking. I do book events, but only interviews, not speeches, because I can’t get up and just – talk. 

WM: Was it your love of reading that led to writing? When did you decide to become a writer?

 LM: Yes, I think there aren’t many writers who weren’t massive readers first, even if they came to it late. I realised I wanted to be some kind of writer when I was being crap at being a lawyer. I got work experience at the Guardian when I was 28! And then I was very lucky that, as a journalist, publishers will often approach you to write books, so I started doing that too. 

WM: Your book conjures up a world in which books meant everything. You say you have never enjoyed books to the same extent since. Is that do to with children’s books or children as readers?

LM: It’s both, I think. Children’s writers know children will let them get away with NOTHING, so their books tend to be immaculately done at every level. And as a young reader, your boundaries are porous, your mind is open, you’re unsnobbish about what you read, so it all falls on fertile ground. 

 WM: You’ve kept most of your childhood books. Which would you rescue from a burning house? Which would you take to a desert island?

 LM: All of my own, plus hundreds more I’ve added over the years. You cannot make me choose between them – it’s too cruel! 

 WM: Many of the books you describe – such as The Railway Childrenby E. Nesbit, The Narnia Chroniclesby CS Lewis – portray a different world, different class, to that you were growing up in. Why were they so entrancing and does their attraction endure today?

LM: I just treated it all as different degrees of fiction, I think – magical lions and children living in country cottages or talking posh; I knew some of that had existed and some never would, but neither disturbed or alienated me. And I think that continues down the generations.