Do you remember what you did when you were 11 years old? I think I was somewhere between playing with building blocks and listening to Hip Hop. In any case, I wasn’t doing something very memorable.

Jyoti and Suresh Guptara, twins of Indian and British descent, however, did something else: They wrote an entire book. That book, entitled Conspiracy of Calaspia, was, after a lot of rewriting, eventually published when the twins were 17 and immediately became a bestseller in several countries.

“When we started writing, it was much more about the ambition to write an entire book than about the actual book”, said Jyoti and Suresh Guptara, now 19, when I met them last weekend in Zurich. Now, they have just finished their second novel, part two in the Insanity trilogy (due to be published in March 2009) and have started working on the third one.

“We’re often just throwing out ideas and discussing the story and the characters”, they explain. “Sometimes, one of us misunderstands what the other says – and from that often emerges a cool new idea.”