Last month, I wrote a post about my favourite adverts. That list has just gotten longer. If you’re anything like me, you could not possibly care any less about that whole royal wedding shindig (and it’s a shame the Republican Street Party in Camden got banned by the council). T-Mobile has been delivering quirky and unusual ads for a while now, but this one goes beyond everything they’ve done so far. They’ve selected look-alikes and created their version of the royal wedding which is so ridiculous, I can’t help but wonder how long it will take before it gets banned. It’ll surely upset some royalists, but that makes it even funnier.

LBF, celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, was quite the experience. I have been to many fairs in my life, but none have been anything like this one. From the first morning when I arrived, I was in awe. Earls Court was filled with books to the last corner, and people who make their livelihood writing, publishing, selling or distributing them: heaven. While even after three days I am still not entirely sure what deals were being struck at all those tables, I have come across many people whom I’ve had the utmost respect for for a long time. I ended up buying a cup of coffee next to Richard Charkin, CEO of Bloomsbury, Cory Doctorow rushed past me in the Digital Zone, and I met a lot of new, interesting people.

I went to talks by Richard Charkin, Cory Doctorow, James Bridle, the winners of the International Young Publishing Entrepreneur Award, I saw interviews with Kazuo Ishiguro and Boris Anukin. I went to a seminar with David Rowan, Frank Rose and Matt Locke, and to one with Tom Hall, Joe Pickering, Davina Quarterman and Angus Phillips. I saw presentations by companies such as Sideways and iPublishCentral. And I spent £1.95 on a tea that I had to drink black because they were out of milk.

To tell the truth, my brain is still trying to catch up with the massive amount of information that got dumped on it these past few days. I got a real buzz from learning from these people – I took more notes at the LBF than during most lectures. I could hardly keep up with scribbling down all the knowledge that got thrown at me, and it felt absolutely amazing!

I also loved the fact that I had so many languages around me constantly. French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish… This is my world (and multilingualism is about the only thing I really miss about my home country). Constantly switching languages and being surrounded by books, while learning from the very best in the industry: there cannot possibly be anything better. I cannot wait for LBF 2012.

Tibor Fischer interviewed Boris Anukin.

Boris Anukin spoke about he doesn’t read fiction anymore, and about the origins of the Russian crime genre.

Kazuo Ishiguro spoke about his next book and how authors may be able to survive in a world where books are pirated.

I was tempted to listen in on some of the talks at these tables, but the space was too open to do it inconspicuously.

Lost? There were close to 1700 different companies at the fair.

This, quite frankly, shocked me a lot, and I could never work for such a publisher.

I feel increasingly privileged to be on the publishing course at Kingston University. The amount of knowledge thrown at me and the amount of highly respectable people I have met is extraordinary. Richard Duguid, editorial manager of Penguin, was one of my lecturers last term, and I heard talks by the likes of Patrick Keogh, creator of Faber Academy and Head of Guardian Masterclasses. To me, this is (almost) up there with having seen talks by Merlin Mann of Inbox Zero and 43Folders fame, and John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame, arguably the two biggest stars in nerdworld.

As every week since the beginning of the course, yesterday we had another inspiring speaker come in to give a two hour lecture. This time it was bestselling author RJ Ellory, a man who wrote twenty-two novels before he ever got published. I admit that I have not yet read any of his books, although I do remember seeing A Quiet Belief in Angels piled up in bookshops (of which I have now bought a copy). Ellory is an incredibly captivating speaker, to say the least. His determination and inspirational tale did something to me I hadn’t really felt since my last creative writing classes of my BA: I couldn’t wait to get out of there and start writing, and at the same time I wanted to just sit there and listen to him talk for the rest of my life. I learned quite a bit about the publishing world from his lecture, yes, but that wasn’t what I carried away with me: here was a man who has had many dark hours (he lost his mother aged seven and doesn’t know anything about his father apart from a first name), but he showed this incredible get-up-and-go attitude. The sheer willpower and belief in himself to write twenty-two novels that kept being turned down by over a hundred publishers, and then getting back to writing after an eight year break is almost unimaginable to me.

Where were you when 9/11 happened? I was at a football game. I remember my dad telling me about two planes having flown into the Twin Towers – buildings I had never even heard of. It was the end of a summer that I’d spent celebrating for having made it through the most horrible year in school I ever had. I’d almost failed maths and thus the year (a part of me still dies every time I think about factorising polynomials, particularly perfect square trinomials), I was about to switch schools for the second time (out of what would eventually be three) to get out of doing advanced maths and it had ruined my dreams of studying quantum mechanics. Oddly enough, I would turn up to exams the years after that without even having looked at what we were being tested on, because I had understood everything during lessons and sat outside the classroom explaining e.g. Euclidean vectors (which I love to this day) to classmates who were panicking. And then I walked away with the highest possible mark. Long story short: 9/11 didn’t have an impact on my life other than marking the end of a summer which was pivotal to me anyway. I was shocked and emotionally shaken, but fifteen year-old me ultimately had more pressing thoughts.

I think I lost the goal in my life ever since I had to give up on studying quantum mechanics. When other kids wanted to become firemen or astronauts, I wanted to be an astrophysicist. I still remember observing a supernova through a telescope at a gathering of astronomers my dad took me to, a breathtaking and devastatingly beautiful picture I will never forget. Over time, that fascination turned from an obsession with the uninamginably big to the unimaginably small – from protons and neutrons to quarks and strings.

When 9/11 happened, RJ Ellory was at work, watching the events as they unfolded on television. And he realized that thousands of lives had stopped right that moment. People went to work one morning, and suddenly all those lives hung in limbo. Relationships, hopes, dreams, everything unfinished. Never look back on your life and ask yourself “what if I had…?” is one of the lessons he learned early on in his life, and so he sat down and began writing again. Two years later, Orion put his novel into bookshops.

The last couple of weeks have been incredible for me. I am now a published author myself, I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday in the place that I have been calling home for five years now, and in the census question on national identity I made a tick next to Welsh. For most of my life I didn’t even have a national identity! Yet still there are so many what ifs. The difference is that I finally feel like I am ready to tackle them. Thanks to one man I will probably never meet again.

That’s the true greatness of this publishing course: it doesn’t just challenge me, it inspires me.