James Scudamore’s first novel, The Amnesia Clinic, won the 2007 Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. His second, Heliopolis, was longlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. He is Visiting Fellow Of Creative Writing at the University Of East Anglia. James tends to love a ruined building over a fresh one. He collects weird old tools that he would never use even if he knew what they were for. He has a habit of revisiting and revising his opinion. He hoards. He derives so much pleasure from that which is decayed, superseded, wrecked, dilapidated and supplanted that he honestly thinks the safest answer to the question of what’s defunct in his life is: nothing.