I like my writers to be vulnerable. The ones who speak their truth with conviction, undeterred by judgment. How rare and refreshing in 2019 when so many of us rarely say what we mean and mean what we say. It’s all about artifice, cynical self-branding and commodifying the self. And that applies to literature as well as content marketing. How many of us can afford to be truthful?

Perhaps that’s why I gravitated towards Ocean Vuong and his celebrated debut novel On Earth Were Briefly Gorgeous. There’s been a lot of heat on this young man, not least because his first poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds won the prestigious Whiting Award as well as the Forward prize and TS Eliot prize.