Walk the line: Seán Hewitt on inspiration and the life lessons that come from loss

I’ve always written things. An abandoned novel, when I was sixteen, which was spurred by Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, but set (improbably) in Cornwall. Poems were mostly secret scribblings about unrequited love. Eventually, after meeting other writers in Liverpool, and then Dublin, I began to take them more seriously, to rework them, and to send poems out to magazines. Then I met my wonderful poetry editor, Robin Robertson at Jonathan Cape, who ...