Alek Wek is exhausted. She's just returned to her adopted hometown of New York from Europe - Amsterdam, Munich, and Milan to publicise her bold and richly inspiring autobiography, Alek: From Sudanese Refugee to International Supermodel, and Hamburg, where she featured in St Emile's spring/summer campaign. 'A lot for one week,' says the woman whose name means 'black spotted cow' in her native Dinka.
Wek, whose first name is stressed on the second syllable, was born in Wau, Sudan, in 1977. At 14, she fled to her sister's flat in London and at 18, was discovered by an agent at a street fair ('I was asked if I wanted to be a model; I just thought they were daft.'). She's since graced international magazine covers, was named 'Model of the Decade' by i-D magazine, voted one of People magazine's '50 Most Beautiful People' in 1999, and appeared in The Four Feathers (2002) with Kate Hudson and Heath Ledger.
'There were not many mirrors around when I was growing up so it wasn't about looking in the mirror each day and seeing what looked gorgeous physically,' she says. 'To my people, beauty is very much about how a woman carries herself, how much you respect yourself, what kind of family raised you, and if others want to marry into it. Beauty is complicated, never just external. There are a lot of elements.'
Her accent, an oxygenated surge of street London and generic American with an African thud, is an easy music. 'I mean, modelling is all about clear skin and beauty, but I never lost touch with my roots. As a child, I had the most terrible, incapacitating psoriasis. I didn't have clear, healthy skin where I could just function and do the simplest things that are rarely appreciated,' she says.
'I couldn't play, I couldn't wash my own clothes, my mother had to spend so much more time with me than with the other children because she didn't want to see me go through that agony. The psoriasis made my skin itchy, it was bloody, there were cracks ... it was painful.
I could never forget that.