William Nicholson

From Arifa Akbar's Q & A with screenwriter (Gladiator, Elizabeth) and novelist William Nicholson, for the Independent:

Choose a favourite author and say why you like him/her

Henry David Thoreau who wrote Walden. He was an utterly original thinker who tried to discover how to live well and believed that giving your entire life to work to live made no sense at all. To live well, he thought we had to make our financial demands as small as possible, so experimented with living in the woods for two years in utter simplicity.

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Which fictional character most resembles you?

Pierre from War and Peace – not physically but psychologically – he is trying to work out how to live and how to make sense of life.

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Who is your hero or heroine from outside literature?

Muhammad Yunus, who founded the Grameen micro-credit movement for women.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue