Michael Frayn's journalism

In The Guardian, Tim Adams talks to Guild member Michael Frayn (best known as a playwright and novelist) about his new collection of journalism: Travels With a Typewriter: A Reporter at Large.

In the introduction to his book - "the closest I'll ever come to a memoir" - Frayn talks about some of the influences that made him a writer, in particular a comment his father made about his first significant essay, "The House I Should Like to Live in When I Am Grown Up", written when he was six. Frayn's reputation for being the smartest man in the room started early: the imagined house in question was not a symmetrical childish affair, but a "boldly art deco structure with flat roof, white stucco walls and long horizontal windows that curved around the corners". "Perhaps," Frayn's father observed, on reading this precocious effort, "you ought to be a journalist."