AT 25, Angela Kiss decided her life needed a new direction and so left her native Hungary for a new life in Frankfurt with some friends.

After waiting for them to arrive for a fortnight she heard from them that they had instead bought flights to London as they were cheaper.

Left facing this conundrum she decided she had wanted to do something spontaneous and so flew over to London herself and started working in a kebab restaurant where she slowly set about piecing together the English language.

Ten years on and she made her first literary appearance at the Swindon Festival of Literature on this afternoon where she presented her take on life in the UK as a ‘foreigner’.

She revealed how George Mikes’ How to be an Alien had really spoken to her, and after a decade of careful observations of us as a species she has newly published How to be an Alien in England – A Guide to the English.

“I always wanted to be a financial advisor,” she told festival organiser Matt Holland during her on-stage interview at the Arts Centre (which is, in fact, her day job).

“I was always good with numbers, I wrote my book in Excel. I am very much into numbers – words are not my thing, but I had a feeling I wanted to inspire people.

“If I had lived in Hungary all my life I wouldn’t have written a book. Here after four years I thought I can do anything. If you work hard you can succeed here.”

And hard she did work – 72 hours a week in the kebab shop for around £600 a month, very little of which she actually saw – while she built up her knowledge of the English language, and the nation’s cultural nuances.

“This is the country where if you dare to dream something big, there is opportunities, it will come true,” she said, but revealed that despite her love of the English nation she longed for a world devoid of political and geographical borders.

“I am a dreamer like John Lennon, imagine a world where there’s no countries, just people living together in peace. That is what I hope for,” she said.

“I don’t like borders, I don’t like nations. When this universe was created it didn’t mean to be divided. I am Angela Kiss. I am a human being.”