Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions.

A WRITER'S G.P TAYLOR

J. K. Rowling may be responsible for the revival of fantasy fiction. But her contemporary rivals, many of whom have benefited from her success, seem reluctant to give her credit for starting a trend. Philip Pullman, for example, points out that Northern Lights, the first volume in his trilogy His Dark Materials, was published a year before Harry Potter's adventures began. So it comes as a surprise when G.P. Taylor concedes that he only wrote a novel because of the enormous popularity of Harry Potter.

Taylor is the Yorkshire vicar who sold his motorbike to self-publish 2,000 copies of his first novel, Shadowmancer, a book that was subsequently picked up by publishers Faber and got to number one in the New York Times bestseller list. His novels conjure up dark, chilling worlds in which the super natural threatens to take over, yet he describes his life as a writer in flatly functional terms. For example, he is able to name the exact day that he became a novelist: March 21, 2002. 'It was one of those seminal moments in my life. Harry Potter was becoming very popular. And I thought, "This woman's written a book. I might write one."

"I got a copy of Harry Potter, counted the number of words that were on the page, measured the width of the margin, counted the number of chapters in the book, how many pages were in the book and set my computer screen up so that it would have 468 words on the page. My chapters were the same length as the Harry Potter chapters; I thought, "This must be how you write the book."

The Harry Potter formula has its faults, of course. Stephen King was once asked what he thought of Rowling's novels. Were they thought-provoking? King thought not. But did that matter, he wondered, in a 'fantasy-adventure aimed primarily at children and published in the heart of the summer vacation'? His conclusion was unequivocal: 'Of course not. What kids on summer vacation want - and probably deserve - is simple, uncomplicated fun.'

Shadowmancer is a simple and uncomplicated fantasy - and Taylor, who is his own most effective critic, makes few further claims for the novel. 'It's a great story, but if I'd written it now, it would be a completely different book. In many ways, it's a clumsy classic. There are a lot of things in there that I would get rid of. And yet, I think that’s the big attraction. It's because it's an incredible adventure story, written by a non-writer, just a storyteller.'

Taylor returns to this distinction between writing and storytelling a number of times, distancing himself from grand and lofty ideas of the novelist's purpose. He describes himself as a 'fairly uneducated, council-house kid' who ran away to London as a teenager, 'a bit of a chancer, with ideas above his station'. He read Dickens, lots of Orwell - 'they were trendy books to read' - and Kerouac. But he is uncomfortable talking at any length about favourite novels or influences beyond Rowling: 'I have not read all that many books. I'm not, you know, a very literate person.'

Taylor was a rock-music promoter in his twenties and remains a showman, happiest in front of a crowd. He describes the talks he gives in schools and at book festivals, dressed up as a sea captain or as an 18^th-century highwayman in a long black coat. 'You’re using your face, you're using your body, you're acting out what you're doing.' The business of putting his thoughts in writing can be problematic in comparison. As a storyteller, in order to demonstrate shock or alarm to an audience he will "pause between sentences and showed a wide-eyed, staring face. But to describe that in English ...’

This impatience with the limitation of language can be a positive asset: in Tersia, Taylor's new fantasy, the speed of the narrative and the scale of the events that overwhelm the characters mean there is no time for the story to get bogged down. That said, it is unusual to hear a writer speak in such a dismissive way of his craft. Shadowmancer has been taken on by Universal Pictures, and Taylor does nothing to hide the fact that he thinks 'the movie's more exciting than the book’.