Always ask yourself what you’d want to do with your time if it made no money at all and, if you can, try to incorporate at least an element of that into your path. You spend a lot of your time working, so make sure it’s something you want to be doing, at least some of the time. Have you any advice for similarly versatile students struggling to decide on a career path? Q: You are a physics graduate who obviously also had a flair for creative writing. Something about the fragility of the self intrigues me. But I’m fascinated by what happens when extraordinary things happen to ‘ordinary’ people and the effects on the psyche of these very extreme events. That’s a really good question, and one I’m not certain I can answer! I don’t try to pick things apart too much – I think that kind of thing comes from a deep place within, and scrutinising it too closely can make it too ‘conscious’. Why do you find psychological disturbance a good vehicle for exploring this? Q: Your protagonists – Christine, a traumatised amnesiac, Julia, an internet sex addict, and Alex, who has repressed memories – pose questions about our sense of self. It’s another psychological thriller, though, and is my best book yet. I’m just starting to edit my new book, the title of which I’m currently keeping to myself.

Q: Subsequently you published Second Life in 2015 and Final Cut in 2020. In some ways, it’d be quite sad if it wasn’t! And, of course, it was tremendously exciting to see it made into a film with Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth! But I hope my writing is maturing. It gave me the life I have now, in many ways. I’ll always have a soft spot for that book. How do you feel about it now looking back? Q: Ten years have passed since your critically acclaimed debut novel Before I Go To Sleep, which became a movie. I’m also looking forward to finishing a new book, and there are a couple of other projects I want to get stuck into. On a personal level, I’m looking forward to going out and seeing friends and travelling. I’m very well, thank you, though that’s a relative question these days! I’m very lucky in that even in the middle of lockdown, I still have my work, and so on, so I’m relatively unaffected by what’s happening. Q: Hi, Steve, how are you doing? What are you looking forward to this year? This week we talk to SJ Watson, writer of the critically acclaimed Before I Go to Sleep, Second Life and Final Cut

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