Studying creative writing in my mid-thirties, I came to dread the class when it would be my turn to read out my work. The night before would be sleepless and I would even, on occasion, resort to feeble excuses ('Oh, I forgot it was today'; 'Sorry but I've been ill and haven't been able to work') in order to be passed over for the next poor sap in line. It couldn't be put off forever, however, and I would sweat and stutter, mumble and sigh through the reading. The reasons for my terror of reading aloud from my own work are complicated, rooted in ambition and a horrible stew of inflated ego and self-doubt that probably could be summed up thus: What if I were not as good as I thought I was? What if, I wondered, my stories are really no better than the woman who writes interminable pseudo-autobiographical stories about coming to terms with being a lesbian?

Was it really better - as the motivational types would have it - to have tried and failed than not to have tried at all? Is there not comfort in some sorts of failure?

Writers are anxious re-arrangers of things, according to Joan Didion, and she is probably right; after all, she also said that writers are always selling somebody out. Writing is a private act, secretive. Moving words around on a page day after day, sorting memories, distributing clues, deciding what to reveal and what to keep hidden. Text and subtext, truth and lies. For the writer, fiction is often part exposure, part feint.

Without wishing to get overly mystical about things, the act of writing fiction involves a strange and rather delicate splitting of the self. The fellow who does the dishes, forgets people's names, ferociously bites his nails and eats porridge for breakfast - the everyday me, in other words - and the one who performs the slightly dreamy act of writing are, subtly, different. The everyday me doesn't actually narrate my works of fiction. Instead it is the writerly version of myself - the one with access to the (hopefully) best possible word, who can spend months revisiting sentences to ensure they are just right, who can see the structure of the story being told, who understands his characters; the one who rearranges.

Before I was a published novelist, I foolishly allowed myself to fantasise about what it might be like to have a book out there in the world with my name on it. There would be fame, of course; humble but inspiring speeches upon reception of awards; fans; adulation. Money!

My imagination got the best of me, naturally, because letting my imagination get the best of me is a hazard of the job. Sadly, few of these things has come to pass for me. Instead, there have been a number of what we might call unintended consequences of being a published author, the most notable of which for me is the curious ritual of the public event.

The trouble with the public event for an author is that the audience expects the writerly, more knowledgeable version of the writer to attend and is often non-plussed by the everyday stuttering chap who shows up to talk about the book their other, writerly self has somehow managed to write. More than once I have been asked a specific question about an aspect of my work, only to struggle to recall if I had, in fact, written what has just been claimed.

But this is not unusual. Most published authors have stories of public humiliation: there's the excruciating fifteen minutes sitting at the book-signing table next to crime writer Val McDermid, with her queue of eager buyers stretching out of sight through the front entrance of Queensland State Library, while your own 'queue' consists of your knock-kneed publicist chatting up the sleazy sales bloke from the chain bookstore; the event at the local library cancelled for complete lack of interest, free wine and crackers notwithstanding; the ageing fellow enthusing about a novel he believes is yours but was, in fact, written by your arch rival, the guy you think is actually, you know, terrible.

None of which ever happened to me, of course. Like I say, sometimes my imagination gets the better of me.

And then there's the writers' festival, the glorious umbrella under which many of the aforementioned rituals take place. I've been on a number of different panels during several festivals in the past few years: I've mulled over the dark in literature in a hot tent in Byron Bay with MJ Hyland; the gothic with Louise Welsh in a Melbourne bar; the ins and outs of writing criminal characters with Michael Robotham on Sydney Harbour. I was beginning to think I had a handle on the whole Being on Stage thing.

But then there was Cheltenham.

The invitation to attend the 2011 Cheltenham Literary Festival as a guest came late one night. A final email check, and there it was. I thought it was a cruel hoax. That someone would fly me across the country to shoot the breeze about books has always seemed rather improbable to me. Would someone really be willing to fly me to the other side of the world? Apparently, yes.

The program, when it arrived was extensive and, well, strange. In addition to writers, there were a number of comedians, actors and chefs who, while no doubt very talented in their particular field, seemed to have little to offer the realm of literature. Never mind, I thought. At least I might learn a thing or two about cooking the perfect duck or hosting my own talk show. Sandwiched in-between were a number of writers of actual books, among them Will Self, Edna O'Brien, China Mieville and AL Kennedy.

This year the Cheltenham Lecture was given by Marina Warner, Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex, writer of numerous books and articles and winner of many prizes. Her book Phantasmagoria - about changing characterisations of spirits and souls since the Enlightenment - was a great source of inspiration for me when I was writing my novel Bereft, a novel which is, in part at least, about death and haunting.

Her latest book Stranger Magic is an examination of the Tales of the Arabian Nights. She spoke eloquently of the spread of the tales and the way their fixation on commerce and riches as rewards mirrored the tenor of the age and the concomitant spread of capitalism. Embedded within the narrative is a subversive counter-narrative which offers an alternative to the apparent misogyny of the umbrella story (women as treacherous, untrustworthy - deserving only of death). Increasing in frequency through the stories are tales in which women are given more dynamic roles and Scheherezade herself is, of course, a heroic figure.

The pleasure of any writers' festival lies in the variety of authors and subjects on offer. And so to David Vann, author of Legend of A Suicide and, more recently, Caribou Island. He said he found it almost impossible to get his novel Legend of a Suicide published because of the grim nature of its subject. It was eventually published in 2008 because it won a prize, one of the conditions of which was publication. Most of the reviews in the US, he said, praised the quality of the writing but advised the public to steer clear of it because of its subject matter. The New York Times, however, supported Vann and the novel has gone on to win a number of prizes and be translated into several languages. 'I sell more of Legend of a Suicide in Catalan than I do in English in the US,' he said, laughing. 'The French love it, too.'

One of the highlights for me was a chance to hear AL Kennedy, China Mieville and Sebastian Peake discuss the bizarre and compelling Gormenghast Trilogy, written by Sebastian's father Mervyn in the late 1940s. Although I only read it for the first time a few years ago, the tale of Steerpike, Countess Gertrude, The Earl of Groan and other castle-bound freaks has come to occupy a special place in my imagination. 

My own participation was listed as a Writer in Residence, an alluringly vague term that indicated all that was required of me was to stare out the window of my hotel and type a few paragraphs here and there for a festival blog. I could do that. In addition, I would front up to a session with my fellow Writers in Residence to discuss the experience. I could do that, too.

The hotel was lovely, the buffet breakfast delicious, the week surreal. I was taken aback at the number of orange-coloured folk on reality TV shows. For my first blog post, the organisers wanted to know what it was I - as an insider, as it were - was most looking forward to. I wrote that the best thing about literary festivals was the opportunity to get very drunk with famous authors and perhaps even mine them for high-class tattle.

This particular post wasn't published.

My session, when it rolled around, was late on a Thursday night. My fellow Writers in Residence and co-panellists - Gail Jones, Witi Ihimaera and Kalinda Ashton - were only just outnumbered by the paying public. Our session was hastily relocated to a smaller room, an anteroom really - a cupboard? - off to the side of one of the writers' room. Noting Witi's presence, a large gentleman expressed (apparently genuine) surprise that Maoris might be able to do anything other than play rugby, a remark Witi greeted with far more civility than it deserved. Ah, I thought, here comes the latest round in a long line of strange experiences as a published author. At least it might give me something to write about one day...

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Bereft by Chris Womersley is published by Quercus.

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Patrick deWitt: The Sisters Brothers
I read this after being shortlisted along with Patrick for the Man Booker prize, and for my money it would have been a worthy winner. A Western in the mould of Charles Portis or the Coen brothers, this story of a pair of sibling killers chasing down their fate crackles with dry wit, its brutal violence studded with moments of heartbreaking humanity. In Eli Sisters, DeWitt creates a narrator who lives and breathes; a monster with whom the reader sympathises, a lost soul searching for virtue in the compassionless world of gold rushes and gunfights. A wise, funny, startling book about dreams both noble and ragged, and of the lengths we'll go to fulfil them.

Patrick Lane: Red Dog, Red Dog
Another Canadian writer named Patrick, and another book that sings with the husky, Steinbeck-esque voice of wisdom hard-earned. The Stark family are a clan united by a legacy of hardship and squalor; they eke a life out of the unyielding landscape of rural 1950s British Columbia, finding consolation from losses past and present in drinking and fighting. Again the story focuses on two brothers - one wayward and remorseless, one quietly planning a desperate escape - and on the consequences of loyalty. Lane paints a portrait of life's defiant losers with compassion and insight, his unflinchingly beautiful prose both lacerating and illuminating at once.

Douglas Coupland: Microserfs
Another Canadian! Not that I'm angling for a freedom pass from the Canadian tourist board or anything...but for me, Microserfs represents Coupland at the peak of his powers. By turns hilariously funny, achingly morose, densely erudite and eye-rollingly hip, it's tragi-comic tale of tech workers striving for meaning within the buzzy world of the mid-nineties software boom fizzes with ideas but never at the expense of its characters. A warm human heart beats beneath the sleek fabricated chassis of a novel that is as concerned with the deeper implications of modern life as it is inquisitive of its surface minutiae.

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Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman published by Bloomsbury is now out in paperback.
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Where do you write?
Here, or sometimes at the public library.

How do you write?
Methodically, tenaciously and slowly.

What keeps you writing?
How to express it? Writing gives my life a basic sense of purpose. Or maybe it helps me find purpose in other things.

Who do you write for?
I'm not sure it works like that for me; do we always do things for people (including ourselves), or do we sometimes just do them? I think I write for the sake of writing, and the book itself becomes its own reason to carry on.

Do you discuss your work with anyone?
I might discuss an idea in the abstract, and to very few people. I might do that quite a lot in the early stages. But as for the words on the page, I don't tend to share them or talk about them at all until the end when I'll hand it over to willing readers - more and more I see writing as an absolutely solitary thing to do.

How do you know if your work is good?
I know when it's as good as it can be; a bell chimes, and until it chimes I keep going. As for whether this makes it good as such, I honestly have no useful measure for my own work. I know when it's done, but that's as much as I can say.

Do you have any unwritten characters in mind?
No, I have a very holey mind; it's through the writing that characters and stories come to my mind, and not the other way round.

Which book do you wish you'd written?
Every time I read a book by Graham Greene or Jose Saramago I feel bit annoyed that it should be their names on the front and not mine.

What is your literary guilty pleasure?
All my literary guilt comes in the form of books I haven't yet read and feel I should have. There's nothing I read that I feel guilty about.

Which writer made you want to write?
I'm not sure I could really say, it seems a gradual process of intoxication. Reading philosophy certainly made me want to write - I always felt that fiction could handle philosophy's big questions in new ways. And for some reason, Graham Swift's Waterland and AS Byatt's Still Life stand out as influential - two books I read at around the same time, the time I was first harbouring ideas of writing a novel. They impressed me as pieces of writing as well as pieces of reading; I remember thinking, I wonder if I could ever do something like that?

Who's the most exciting author writing today?
I take issue with the idea of the word 'most' here - it so often seems to be about the best, the most, the biggest, the newest, the saddest, the funniest. I think that the hunger to rank and measure authors as if by an objective standard is a very distracting and difficult thing in a writer's life. But (rant over) if I think about the many writers I love reading now, David Foster Wallace comes up again and again. I know that he isn't still writing today, but that's a mere technicality.

If you weren't writing you'd be...?
. . . having less trouble getting a mortgage.

What next?
This is the question I ask myself.

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All Is Song by Samantha Harvey is published by Jonathan Cape.
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This past Tuesday, my boyfriend Kevin proposed. It was a wonderfully romantic evening, complete with champagne, excited phone calls to our parents, a fancy dinner out, and a long walk on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, which overlooks the Brooklyn Bridge and all of Manhattan beyond.

Twenty-four hours later, we both had the flu.

We had already planned to head to Boston, where my family lives, on Saturday. We had collected about a hundred gifts from friends for a local shelter's holiday toy drive, and needed to sort them out and drop them off. Kevin had booked us into a hotel in downtown Boston for Sunday night as a way to continue the engagement celebration. Although we were still feeling lousy, we decided to stick with our plan. We arrived at my parents' house last night, getting a flat tire in the rain along the way.

This morning, we brought our sixty-pound hound/retriever mix Landon to an incredibly upscale boarding facility, with a large green Astroturf field and a swimming pool in the shape of a bone, where we paid for him to have a private room with a Skype connection and a few extras, including a cheese and bacon treat which smelled so delicious that I myself might consider eating if there was nothing good in the cupboards. We've never left him anywhere before. Perhaps this is a good time to mention that we are Crazy Dog People. I used to think Crazy Dog People were in desperate need of a hobby and/or children, but now I am one of them and there's not much I can do about it.

Tonight, too sick to go anywhere, we lie in a beautiful bed in a beautiful hotel room in Boston. We sniffle, cough on each other, order tea and chicken soup from room service, watch Downton Abbey on TV and obsessively monitor our dog on Skype.

Monday

Still unable to breathe through our noses, we grab an early lunch on Newbury Street, and head to pick up the dog, who seems only slightly scarred for life. On the drive back to New York, we listen to Tina Fey's Bossypants on CD, which we agree is pretty terrific. We discuss the fact that neither of us likes the word fiancé. It seems so showy and somehow transitional. It begs for a response. Saying "this is my boyfriend," or "this is my wife," usually gets a reply of, "Oh hey, nice to meet you," while saying, "this is my fiancé," seems to ask for something like, "Oh my gosh, how did he propose? When are you getting married? How many bridesmaids will you have?" And so on.

All of this is part of a new novel I'm writing about marriage and the diamond industry over the last century, so I am interested for reasons both personal and professional. (Though I swear I didn't get engaged just for research.)

Tuesday

Once you're a published author, blurbs become a big part of your life. Some authors flat out refuse to give them, but I try to do as many as I can. When my first novel, Commencement, was published in the States, writers I had never met were incredibly generous with their time, and I feel it's only right for me to do the same.

Sometimes you get asked to blurb something that's not particularly good, but you blurb it anyway because the editor once did you a favor, or the author is your cousin's girlfriend's cubicle-mate, or you met him at a party once and you're just too chicken to say no. Today, I have the pleasure of reading the manuscript of a first novel that is really and truly great. It's so enjoyable that I feel kind of guilty for lying in bed reading all afternoon. But then I remind myself that it's for work. I brew some peppermint tea and carry on.

Wednesday

Kevin and I wake early to take the dog to off-leash hours in the park. The Crazy Dog People at off-leash hours make us look normal. Their dogs have names like Noam Chompsky. One woman claims that her poodle is bilingual, and speaks to him in both English and Spanish. We live right at the edge of Park Slope, a neighborhood full of beautiful brownstones and baby carriages, though our particular corner has more of a crumbling-bodega-across-from-a-gas-station vibe.

I'm finally feeling a bit better. And I've just remembered that I was invited here because I'm a writer, so today I will actually write. My third novel is due in September, nine months from now. It's a strange point in the writing process--far from the beginning, yet still relatively far from the end. Some days I think I'm on track, nine months being plenty of time. (Enough to make a human being, so that's something, I'll think to myself as I sink into one more episode of House Hunters.) Other days, I'm panicked, thinking that there will never be enough time to get the story exactly the way I want it.

I work at the Brooklyn Writers Space, an old converted brownstone a few blocks from my apartment. It's wonderful. Everyone there is quite serious. If your cell phone should ring, you may be taken out back and shot. The place is silent, which for me is essential when I'm writing.

Thursday

I take the subway uptown to meet an English journalist who is writing a story about the UK release of my novel Maine. On the way there, I am stopped by a truancy officer in the station and asked, "Sweetheart, how old are you?" In case you missed that last bit: I WAS STOPPED BY A TRUANCY OFFICER. This may be the very best Christmas present that a thirty-year-old woman could possibly receive.

The journalist and I drink tea at a diner and have a great chat about everything from romantic comedies to the Royal Family to Twitter. Afterward, I realize that because of the flu, I haven't really spoken much to anyone all week, and perhaps as a result, I've talked too much.

Hoping I didn't make an ass of myself, I grab a taxi and head to lunch with a friend who's in town from Los Angeles for the holidays.

Friday

I go to the Writers Space for the morning. In the afternoon, with our little car packed full of presents, we drive the 225 miles to Boston for the second time this week. (Yes, I realize this makes very little sense.)

At eight o'clock, I attend the annual Garden Street Girls Christmas party. There are seven Garden Street Girls, including me. We all grew up on the same block, and we're all a year or two apart in age. We're far-flung these days, but we still gather annually to gossip, laugh, share our worries, and talk about boys. It's exactly as it was twenty years ago, only now we're allowed to drink wine.

Saturday

On the morning of Christmas Eve, we take Landon to a dog park by the ocean, where he promptly gets his entire body covered in mud. We make an emergency visit to a place called BYOD (Bring Your Own Dog), where you can give your dog a bath in a big steel tub with oatmeal shampoo. It's great, and designed specifically for suckers like us.

Every Christmas Eve, one of my aunts has a party at her house. Thirty or forty of our relatives convene to eat, drink, and exchange gifts. My extended family is big and boisterous. I remember once, at this particular party, I saw a strange woman come through the door. She was in her fifties, and nicely dressed. One of my uncles kissed her hello and took her coat. A cousin poured her a drink. She was having a great time, laughing and telling stories. It took about twenty minutes before anyone, including her, realized that she was at the wrong house.

I hope every one of you had a wonderful holiday and a great New Year. And if my editor is reading this, I swear I usually spend much more time writing than I did this week.

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Maine by Courtney Sullivan is published by Atlantic Books.
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Caldwell and I meet, appropriately enough, on St Lucy's Day. The festive air of the run-up to Christmas is magnified by the fact that Caldwell is celebrating having just finished a draft of her third novel (I was lucky enough to get a not-to-be-divulged synopsis). It's late afternoon so we politely order coffee, only to both eventually admit that we wish we'd ordered wine instead.

Although The Meeting Point was published at the very beginning of the year, it 's recently been back in the limelight after winning the 2011 Dylan Thomas Prize for young writers. Described by the judges as a "beautifully written and mature reflection on identity, loyalty and belief in a complex world", Caldwell's novel was chosen from an exceptionally strong shortlist, including Tea Obreht's Orange Prize-winning The Tiger's Wife. This seems like the perfect end to the year, winning the prize and then finishing a first draft of her next book, so I'm keen to find out how Caldwell's been celebrating.

"That's what my students asked when I won," Caldwell laughs (she's a lecturer on the Creative Writing MA at City University), "but I told them, 'Actually, I'm at my desk working.' I want to set a good example for them of course," she continues, "but really, you're only as good as your next piece. You have to keep writing."

As well as working on her third novel, Caldwell has been adapting Diana Wynne Jones' children's book Witch Week for BBC Radio 4 Extra. She's absolutely delighted when I tell her that I know the story. "Don't you think it'll make such an excellent radio play?" she asks gleefully, "I'm so excited about doing it, it's such a chilling story."

Has she ever considered writing children's stories herself?

"Oh yes," she replies, "I've always wanted to write a children's series. Something like The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper for example. I think that books you read at that age remain with you for longer and are more powerful than a lot of things you read as an adult. Perhaps it's because you're more fully formed as an adult; it takes something more to affect you."

Also a prize-winning playwright, Caldwell won a place on the young writer's programme at the Royal Court after leaving university. Her play Leaves (2007) was later performed there, and she has also been writer-in-residence at the National. She'd taken her first play to Edinburgh after university, she explains, and the play script got into the hands of someone at the National who then asked if she'd like to come in for an attachment. Surprisingly enough, her immediate response was one of horror, precisely because "it seemed like such an amazing opportunity". But luckily she decided to give it a go. She was waiting for her first novel, Where They Were Missed, written while she was still an undergraduate at Cambridge, to be published at this point, and in fact found her eight weeks with the theatre "amazing".

"I had a room, a backstage pass and there were directors and actors there I could use, and halfway through I had a rough draft. I'd worked so hard, so they paired me up with Natalie Abraham (now assistant director at The Gate) and we cast my play, did a reading, and then I went away and did some more work. I didn't read any prose, bar Plath's The Bell Jar, the entire time, I was so determined to write a play. But afterwards it took me about six months to surface again as I'd been writing about this nineteen-year-old who didn't want to live anymore. It took a good six months to separate myself from her. I suppose it's like what Nietzsche says; if you look into the abyss the abyss is going to look back at you."

Does she find her characters often take her over like that? Yes, she tells me, using the example of The Meeting Point: despite having already realised that the story was going to be about a minister's wife and set in Bahrain - and even these elements can't, she explains, be described as conscious choices as much as decisions based on gut instinct or intuition - when she actually started writing, she found herself writing a teenager's diaries. This character eventually became Noor, but at that stage Caldwell had no idea who she was. "It was like a compulsion," she explains, "I didn't know where she came from."

We talk about whether writing is a means by which one can live other people's lives, or whether it's more complicated than that. "Partly," Caldwell suggests. "It's impossible to know completely what it's like to be someone else, but that's what all art does; its empathy. It allows you to try to see what it's like to live other lives or experience other things."

She goes on to talk about her various teenage characters, explaining that she enjoys the technical challenge they present. "If you write a thirteen-year-old, that's utterly different from writing a fifteen-year-old," she declares. "When you're writing adult characters age just doesn't matter so much, and the writing is so much to do with being in control of the form, the syntax and the vocabulary."

She speaks about the technicalities of writing with a great deal of thought and understanding; a firm believer in the honing of her craft, who takes issue with the view held by some that you're either a writer or you're not. "Why is learning or teaching drawing or painting - or music techniques for that matter - any different from learning writing techniques?" she asks. "No one expects an artist to sit alone in a garret until they produce an amazing painting, but with writing it's all too often about the muse descending rather than something you have to work on."

And, it seems, it works both ways, as teaching writing constantly forces her to question and reflect on her own work. "When you're writing something it can't be safe," she explains, "you have to give a part of yourself to let it live, which is why you always feel so bereft when you finish something because you've given a part of yourself away. So you also have to be open to change; be open to yourself changing."

That said, she tells me she was completely perplexed when she realised the extent to which people assumed her first novel was autobiographical just because it was set in Northern Ireland where she herself grew up, roughly during the same period. "It's odd that people are put out when they realise that it's not," she laughs, "it's like they feel slightly cheated or something."

She has a theory about why so many young authors write novels set in the period in which they themselves grew up. "It's not because writing is necessarily autobiographical," she suggests, "but when you're creating a world for the first time and you've never done it before, the world that is most alive or vivid is often that of your childhood. Building a world from scratch can be done - I did it in The Meeting Point - but it's a case of layering, and I need to be as confident in that setting as I am in my childhood setting."

She then goes on to explain how she found herself drawing endless maps of the compound in Bahrain in which her characters live in The Meeting Point, in order that she could correctly visualise the various lines of sight from each villa. "None of this makes it into the novel, but it's the necessary scaffolding so I can feel confident in that world," she declares. "I love that when you write fiction, you have the whole world inside of you. I'm such a private writer as well; I wait until I have a full draft before I send it to my editor. I find that the effect of my work is cumulative, so it's never that interesting to hear people's views on one chapter alone because they don't have the whole thing in context." As such, she very much enjoys the solitude of novel writing, although she admits this doesn't stop her sometimes "craving the interactiveness of a play".

It is clear that Caldwell has her pick of writing projects and all her work so far is held in high acclaim. I and a growing legion of fans, eagerly await both her adaptation of Witch Week (due for broadcast in the spring) and the new novel next year.

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The Meeting Point is published by Faber and Faber.

Lucy Scholes writes for the Sunday Times,TLS, Independent, Daily Beast and the Huffington Post UK. She also teaches at the University of London, and Tate Modern.

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Where do you write?
On a neat desk overlooking woods.

How do you write?
I get up, put on coffee and pants, see if I have something to say.

What keeps you writing?
Sometimes I feel frisky enough to presume.

Who do you write for?
People I want to think not ill of me.

Do you discuss your work with anyone?
No. I have run all the women off.

How do you know if your work is good?
If the first impression is that it is worthless, the second that it is not that bad, the third that it is maybe okay--in fact, who wrote this? Where did it come from?

Do you have any unwritten characters in mind?
No. I have nothing in mind; I look for the next word.

Which book do you wish you'd written?
Absalom! Absalom!

What is your literary guilty pleasure?
Not reading.

Which writer made you want to write?
At age seven or so I read this dedication to me in one of my grandmother's (Rubylea Hall) novels:

FOR

My grandson, John (Padgett) Powell, who bears (through coincidence) the name the Flaming Prince was known by, until he chose his warrior name, Assi Yahola.

This had a magic effect. Later, when I realized my grandmother had escaped the family by becoming a black sheep and moving to New York to be a writer, I saw her as the thing to be.

Who's the most exciting author writing today?
There is a young twisted fellow from Jacksonville Florida named Marcus Pactor. It's the best I've seen in some time.

If you weren't writing you'd be...?
Not writing. Writing is a cul-de-sac of inability to do anything else.

What next?
I am playing with a cartoonish book that involves these things: a grandee of southern letters who keeps boys, one of the boys, another of the boys who dies, an Author hired by a Committee to write this book, the Author's father's book on WWII, and another book in which the Author's father appears. These last two books are real, and the Author's father is my father.

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Padgett Powell's most recent books are The Interrogative Mood and You & I, both published by Serpent's Tail.
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I have returned to this theme again and again - in Foucault's Pendulum and in many essays. Why? Because it's an intellectual and moral scandal. The Protocols are absolutely crazy because they are so contradictory. They are like Frankenstein's monster, made up of different pieces of human corpses. The contradictions are so evident, yet people took them seriously. And when they were demonstrated to be false by The Times in 1921, instead of that being the end of the story, they were published and republished, and believed all the more, across the Arab world and here in London, and they remain in circulation. Many important historical books have been written about this phenomenon - such as Norman Cohn's Warrant for Genocide - but those books are for academics, they reach perhaps 5,000 people. I had the idea that by telling the story in a narrative way, imagining how the Protocols came into being, the logic and psychology behind it, I could speak to a larger group of readers. This educational impulse is something a writer should never have, and I'm very ashamed of it: you should write for the pleasure of writing, not in order to educate someone. But step by step I was caught up in the pleasure of the narration, the pleasure of creating such an offensive character as Simone Simonini (the imagined author of the Protocols). And I hope the book doesn't come across like sermonising.

One or two reviews have taken offence at the clearly offensive views of Simonini, but my first defence is that a twelve-year-old on the internet can find the Protocols themselves and many other poisonous materials: they are out there. At least this novel explains the nature of racism. For reasons of political correctness we tend not to mention these things any longer, it seems impolite and a cliché. But these clichés always circulate below the surface, a lot of people share them, so it is important to say them aloud so you remember they are there. Not just among the Taliban, but here around you; among your friends. My second response is that one cannot control antagonistic readings of this book. The author does his best to keep the reader distanced from the character, to demonstrate that Simonini is a liar and a criminal and not to be worshipped or emulated. I showed the book to the Chief Rabbi of Rome and other members of the Jewish intellectual community before it was published and, while the Rabbi admitted that some may be seduced by Simonini, he liked the book, and the community has been generally supportive.

While writing this book and faithfully reproducing every aspect of 19th-century Paris, of course I was thinking of today. I was clearly seeing in my mind many Simoninis who are around us, doing the same things with the same absence of morality; journalists producing fake dossiers to destroy the enemy. If I was not afraid of being sued, I could mention names...

The book was published in Italy in October 2010, and Simonini has this particular idea that you cannot give the secret service information that they don't already know; you must never reveal something new. One month later the WikiLeaks affair blew up, and you could see for example that all the messages the American ambassador in Rome sent to the Pentagon were saying exactly what Newsweek had already published. They revealed nothing new; only press clippings. I don't know whether this is due to laziness, or to the fact that you really can't disturb those in power with unheard-of news, because it discombobulates them.

Men are believing animals; they have to believe in something. Religions exist as a way to fight against death. There's a famous line attributed to Arthur Rubinstein: "I don't believe in God. I believe in something greater." We always need to see something more complex behind every easy explanation. Take the period of terrorism in Italy in the 1970s. Young men between 20 and 30 were living like wounded animals, hiding and killing usually innocent people, not even their great enemies, and they became fanatically convinced that they were realising a world revolution. The easy explanation is that there must be a 'big old man' behind it, il grande vecchio, directing the whole operation. But that is the gullible explanation, because to explain why all these people did what they did would cause a lot of pain to society. Why did 5 per cent of a generation decide to take this action? We were all responsible in a way, but il grande vecchio absolves everybody of responsibility. When they kidnapped Moro, it was an excellent military operation. They stopped three cars, killed the police and picked up Moro: job done. And immediately the response was that it's impossible that these young men were capable of organising such a precise operation - ignoring the fact that people in their thirties could become bank managers, journalists, writers, whatever, so it's very easy for a man of thirty to be able to do all that. But Il Tempo said no, there must be another explanation.

As Chesterton said, "when a man stops believing in God, he believes in everything." So as the great religions decline, all the small sects, associations and mythologies grow, people shift to astrology or even Satanism, we are ready to believe in anything. Otherwise why play the lottery? A gambler will always lose, whether in a Monte Carlo casino or on a slot machine in Las Vegas. It's written in all the statistical books, and still we do it. We need to believe that one time or another some divinity will protect us and we'll collect the jackpot.

The general conspiracy is based on the necessity of having an enemy. After the novel I published a collection of essays with the title Constructing the Enemy. Every human group designs an image of the enemy, and the pattern is always the same. The general model is the Anti-Christ in Judeo-Christianity and in Homer, who is crippled, has a big nose, pointed ears, deformed feet, and he stinks. Every enemy stinks. The early Christian heretics were supposed to eat babies. Same with the Jews and Communists, according to popular legend and propaganda. The enemy is always manipulated by dictatorships to keep the people united. It's like Orwell's daily ceremony of hatred in 1984.

The most dangerous enemy has no face, he's a mysterious entity. I was educated under the fascist dictatorship to believe the English were the enemy who ate five times a day. It was only later that I realised that, belonging to a middle-class Italian family, I myself ate five times a day. Once in the morning, then something at school at 10 o'clock, lunch at noon, another snack at five o'clock, then dinner. I ate like an Englishman! We saw images of Churchill, very fat with a cigar, but every rumour is always self-contradictory. Because any English spy or soldier who was captured was gaunt and thin.

The most powerful enemy is ungraspable. That's the great idea of German sociologist Georg Simmel: to have power you must possess a secret. I have power over you and I can blackmail you if I have some secret about you. But at a given moment secrets are discovered, so the most powerful instrument is an empty secret, because you can always use it but nobody can uncover it. The Protocols are more or less like that; a group of Rabbis meeting in a Prague cemetery, but who are they?

Even our national heroes are ungraspable. Garibaldi was a hero not only for my generation, but for the generation of my father. Like George Washington in America, he was the great hero that nobody could criticise or dispute. At a certain level, there was anti-Risorgimento literature saying that the Piedmontese occupation of the south was really an act of colonialism, not liberation: the reactionary version, like the Vendée against the French Revolution. It never became popular except among small groups in the south, but this criticism contains something. They were the resistance and they were repressed, and it is true that the Risorgimento was the initiative of an intellectual minority; not of the people.

In my book I try to give voice to both sides. When writing it five years ago I didn't know it would be published the same year as the celebrations of 150 years of Italian unification. It looked like I'd done it on purpose, but it was a mere accident. All this last year and still today there is a great discussion in Italy, a revisionism of the entire Risorgimento episode. Criticism of the incomplete Italian unity and so forth, even though at the time every country in Europe was striving to become an independent nation. Italy had to follow the general pattern. It would have been exceptional to have an Italy subdivided into ten different states. Today, curiously, it is the Northern League, not the south that is against the idea of a unified state.

When it comes to the new Italian government of Mario Monti, first of all I feel liberated because before, every time I went to speak on Aristotle or Plato's narrative the question was, "What do you think of Berlusconi?" It was terrible. If I spoke for two hours on Aristotle and then answered a question about Berlusconi, there would be a full-page headline saying I don't like Berlusconi. Italy is in economic crisis. The crisis is the public debt, but the Italian economy is still pretty strong because thousands and thousands of small enterprises are still working. We have the same problems as many other countries, and we have to solve them. The difficulty in solving them before was that our leader was not taken seriously in Europe. Now we have a serious person, a reliable person in charge. A month ago I was ready to accept anybody, right of centre or left, provided Berlusconi is no longer there. This technocratic government seems to be made of serious people, no longer motivated by political infighting. And objections raised by Berlusconians that this government is made up of people not elected by the public is absolutely stupid. All the deputies under Berlusconi were yes-men, linked to the leader who appointed them, and were not elected by the people. So at the moment I feel happy and confident. Of course it's possible Monti will commit many mistakes but at least he's not Berlusconi. He's not going around making jokes and vulgar gestures and is not motivated by private interests.

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The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco is published by Harvill Secker. Mark Reynolds is a freelance editor and writer, contributing editor to Untitled Books, and Literary Editor of The Drawbridge.
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It tells us a lot about a certain time-slice of Asian experience that a nationally celebrated writer in his forties could be amazed by such a thing. And yet it goes without saying that our Board of Directors selects judges we know will look beyond regional politics. The only thing we ever say to them is that we have but one judging criterion, literary quality, however they collectively conceive it. In our eyes the Man Asian Literary Prize can only fully achieve its mission to Asian literature when the word "prestigious" becomes permanently riveted to the beginning of our name. And this can only follow from an unambiguous dedication to identifying the best no matter where it comes from.

Nonetheless it is worth asking why it might be that three Chinese novels have won the Prize in its first four years. The books are Jiang Rong, Wolf Totem (2007), Su Tong, The Boat To Redemption (2009) and Bi Feiyu, Three Sisters (2010). It may be no coincidence that all had the same translator, Howard Goldblatt! But the more significant connection is surely that all are narratives drawn from the experience and the aftermath of one of the most traumatic mass events of the twentieth century, the Cultural Revolution. That astounding attempt to remake thousands of years of history and culture virtually overnight gave rise to millions of untold stories that have haunted the Chinese imagination and memory ever since. Like the great Russian historical novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries about the Napoleonic wars, Stalingrad and the gulag, these stories cannot but go deep into the darker, tragic recesses of human experience. We who read them cannot but recognize the imaginative power and strangeness generated by coming to terms artistically with such experiences.

The contemporary Western writer does not ordinarily have such experiences or memories close at hand and must therefore travel imaginatively elsewhere, into the past or to exotic places, for example, to seek the power and the strangeness that is the lifeblood of the novel. It may seem to be drawing a long bow to say that non-Western novelists, tapping into more traumatic life experiences, as well as their own rich narrative traditions, often have a natural advantage. Historical traumas of war, political oppression, revolution or colonialism have a left a store of powerful stories clamouring to be told. 

For reasons such as these, when I look for something first-rate to read these days, I find myself turning more and more to non-Western novels. Over the last summer I read the monumental Cairo Trilogy by Nobel Prize winning author Naguib Mahfouz, which refracts the historical shifts in Egyptian society during the British occupation from the First World War to the 1950s through the lens of a single family. I then read The Surrendered, shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, by Korean born novelist Chang-rae Lee, who is one of the judges for this year's Man Asian Literary Prize. This book moves from the Korean War to the Japanese invasion of Mongolia to contemporary USA and Italy. Then I devoured with great delight the first two volumes of Amitav Ghosh's Ibis Trilogy, the second of which, River of Smoke, is itself longlisted for this year's Prize. The trilogy explores events leading up to the Opium Wars. Critics praise Ghosh's work as a "spacious", "panoramic" "broad canvas", an "ambitious medley" with a "profusion of traditions, religions, languages, philosophies and geographies".

These three engrossing books are of epic dimensions, collectively spread across the best part of 3,000 pages. By contrast, the six shortlisted Man Booker novels, which I read before enjoying the incredible privilege of attending the Prize dinner in October this year, together occupy around 1,700 pages. Many have expressed disappointment with the 2011 shortlisted books. I can only say that I found more of what I was searching for in my summer reading. However, the Man Booker winner, The Sense of an Ending, is a miniature of consummate artistry and moral vision - though little more than a novella in scale.

With this recent reading experience in the background, I was struck by the fact that the two books that naturally draw our attention in this year's recently released Man Asian Literary Prize longlist are together not much shorter than the whole Man Booker shortlist. When I commented on the longlist in our press release I was tempted into a perhaps daring speculation that was taken up by the Guardian:

The Tolstoys, Hugos and Eliots of today are to be found not in Europe but in Asia, according to the chair of directors of the Man Asian Literary Prize. Announcing the longlist for this year's $30,000 (£19,000) award for the best novel by an Asian writer, which ranges from Japan to India and Iran to South Korea, Professor David Parker from the Chinese University of Hong Kong said that "if we are looking for books of the epic scale and stature of the great European 19th-century novels, we must turn to Asia".

Pointing to the Man Asian longlist inclusion of both Haruki Murakami's "massive magnum opus" 1Q84 and Amitav Ghosh's three-volume epic about the opium wars, of which River of Smoke is the second volume, Parker said that Asia is producing novels of "a scale and ambition we don't often see in western writing these days.

"Could it be that as the world's economic centre of gravity is moving eastwards, so too is its artistic energy and ambition?" he asked.

I have talked about a commitment to identifying quality as the sole aim of the Prize. So why write about scale and ambition? Does size really matter? What's the connection? If there is one it is between the sheer scale and the epic dimensions of the kinds of books I read over summer and the stature and significance of the historical events, such as the Opium Wars, they encompass. And as I was saying before, those books have a strangeness and a depth that come from artistically worked-through traumatic historical experiences that have demanded and found expressive shape for the first time. In this they do share something with the great European nineteenth century historical novels - before the novel grew in poetic concentration and turned inwards into the theatre of consciousness early in the twentieth century. Obviously I do not wish to claim that the Asian novel has already found its Tolstoy, Hugo or George Eliot. What I am saying is that if the world wants to watch this space, there are reasons to suppose that the next generation of truly great novelists may well come from the East.

If that happens then the new Asian self-confidence that comes from economic centrality in the world needs to be matched by greater cultural self-confidence. And most of Asia has far to go before it can begin to catch up with the West in that. 

It is here that an award such as the Man Asian Literary Prize, drawing in the whole of Asia and working in the global language, can play a significant role. Of all the hundreds of media stories the Prize generates each year, the great majority of them take the following form: "Five Indian novels dominate Man Asian Literary Prize Longlist." Substitute for "Five Indian Novels", a Philippine novel, Korean, Pakistani, or Iranian novel and so on, and you have over 90% of the press stories generated -- in the national media of the relevant countries.

A typical case for the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize is the joyous reaction in Korea to the longlisting of Please Look After Mom by Kyung-sook Shin. This book has sold over a million copies in Korean, so why the outbreak of celebration when the English translation is longlisted in the Man Asian Literary Prize? The answer to this question takes us to the heart of the Prize's mission.

The best way understand that mission is to look in some detail at the astounding press reaction to the publication of the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize winning novel, Ilustrado, by the previously unknown Filipino writer, Miguel Syjuco.

According to Robert McCrum of the Guardian, writing about the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2010, prizes are the "literary powerhouses" of the contemporary world of books. His article focused on Ilustrado, which had just been published globally to great acclaim. "Literary prizes are not only cultural thermometers, reflecting the zeitgeist," he wrote, "but also have the power to propel unknown writers into the limelight."

Why do prizes such as the Man Asian have this power? Syjuco's novel also won a prize in his home country, but as the Manila-based GMANews TV explained, it was the international prize that made all the difference: "After winning locally with the 2008 Palanca Grand Prize for ... Ilustrado, he gained worldwide recognition by bagging the Man Asian Literary Prize in the same year."

The key to the power of the Man Asian Literary Prize, as opposed even to important local Asian prizes, is to confer "worldwide recognition". As the New York Times put it, Syjuco was unheard of before winning the Man Asian Literary Prize, which "recognizes the best Asian novel written or translated into English." Winning the Man Asian means being recognized as "the best" in Asia, an accolade only an international prize can give.

Worldwide recognition points two ways at once. It means for a start that the author is read right across the English-speaking world, and beyond. (Ilustrado has been translated into 16 languages.) This is especially important in Asia because post-colonial societies often suffer from serious forms of misrecognition, or even non-recognition. As Syjuco said in an interview in the Toronto Globe and Mail, "the Philippines is a country people have almost forgotten now," subject to "all these preconceptions and misconceptions about who we are." And local writers have failed to correct them. As Syjuco pointed out very poignantly. "We've been writing in English for 100 years," he said, citing a complaint familiar on the islands. "Why is nobody reading? Why is nobody out there?"

One of the things worldwide recognition means is correcting these "preconceptions and misconceptions about who we are." As Syjuco reminded his countrymen in the Manila Bulletin the false pictures are partly foreign stereotypes of Filipinos as maids, prostitutes, corrupt officials and terrorists. "We are all these things, but much, much more." But to some extent such pictures have been partly created by Filipino writers themselves, "who decided to exoticize themselves." "Carabaos in ricefields, sunlight the color of mangoes. Is that the reality? No it's not. I think publishers and Western readers see through that. It was okay 20 years ago when it first came out, but now it's not."

Like Ilustrado future shortlisted and Prize-winning novels may be able to give important insights into what it actually means to be an Asian "now". Far from the exoticized "East" of Western fantasy or nostalgia, these books will be written out of the globalized experience of 21st century Asia. This is partly what the Guardian article meant by literary prizes as "cultural thermometers" reflecting the spirit of the times. Contemporary young Asian writers like Syjuco or Tabish Khair or Kyung-Sook Shin are likely to have lived, worked or studied in countries such as Canada, the UK or the US, and to be what cultural theorists now refer to as "cosmopolitan" in identity, citizens of the world as much as the country of their birth, and dividing their lives between home and many other places. When they write it is this current, globalized reality that they bring to life, a world in which Asia is rapidly becoming more central.

If the Prize's distinguished novels will increasingly empower us all to view the world anew in the Asian century it will very largely be the contemporary globalized and cosmopolitan reality of countries such as India, South Korea or the Philippines that these books will enable us to recognize more fully.

The other side of worldwide recognition is the stimulus given to the Asian cultures themselves. Within the Philippines, as much as outside it, Syjuco's novel "triggered an excitement about Philippine literature not seen since Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters was published in 1990" (Phillipine Inquirer). If Filipinos are talking about literature as they haven't for twenty years it is because the 2008 Prize winner became something of a media star, someone ordinary kids now write to and ask for autographed pictures or copies of his book (Montreal Mirror). But more than that, Syjuco helped to conjure up new literary possibilities for his fellow Filipino writers. As Syjuco told CNN, in creating his alter ego Crispin Salvador, he was exploring modes of writing he hoped his countrymen would pursue: "I wanted him to write the books I wish I had written. In the Philippines we don't have pulp fiction like his 'Manila Noir'... We don't have seafaring novels. We don't have crime writing. We don't have a lot of the stuff Crispin actually ostensibly wrote. I wanted to put those out there - finally, a writer who did that. Hopefully, that would give Filipino writers the idea, 'Hey, why don't I be that writer.'"

The worldwide recognition coming from success in prizes such as the Man Asian is culturally empowering; it brings a confidence and self-belief vitally necessary to post-colonial cultures, often shamed by centuries of misrecognition. Once again, as the Wall Street Journal points out, the Prize itself has done important work in fostering this growing confidence: "Few Filipino novelists have developed an international following, and the literary scene there is anaemic compared with the country's vibrant film industry. But in the last few years, Filipino authors have started to gain international recognition. Many Filipino novelists write in English - a legacy of the long American presence there. Several have been boosted by the Man Asian prize, which was founded in 2007. Filipino authors accounted for five of the 24 finalists on the 2009 long list, following India as the most represented country, and Manila native Eric Gamalinda was short-listed last year for his novel, The Descartes of the Highlands."

It is clear that a pan-Asian award such as the Man Asian Literary Prize, also misleadingly known as the "Asian Booker" (we share a sponsor with that justly famous prize), provides a stringent scale of recognition on which Asian nations are already beginning to weigh their own cultural achievements against those of other Asian nations. This may suggest a form of national competition, but according to Miguel Syjuco tough competitiveness is precisely what Asian cultures need to hone their cultural achievements. The same market place that sharpens business prowess is needed to make a culture advance. Syjuco outlined the desirability of a more stringent editorial culture in the Philippines: "We're mostly publishing friends. When I went abroad I realized how competitive it is. There was a year when I couldn't even get a short story published. We need to have competition here."

The Man Asian Literary Prize has gained its flattering nickname the "Asian Booker" partly by having judges who, as with the Man Booker, exercise the most rigorous international standards and are blind to everything but literary quality. The most recent chairs of the panel have been Madame Adrienne Clarkson, novelist and former Governor-General of Canada, Colm Toibin, distinguished Irish novelist, Monica Ali, celebrated British author of Brick Lane, and this year BBC arts journalist Razia Iqbal. To be pronounced the winner by one of these is an achievement in some ways beyond even six-figure local sales or winning a top national prize. It is in the hope of such an achievement that the press in South Korea, India or Iran greet the longlisting of one or more of its own writers a little bit like a first-round win in the football World Cup. Such is the blindness of the judges to everything but the literary quality of the books before them that even the biggest names carry no clout. Come 15 March 2012 the announcement of the 2011 winner could well strike a relatively unknown novelist quite speechless.

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The shortlist for the Man Asian Literary Prize will be announced on January 10th.

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This year's Nobel Prize winner is the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. In deference to this choice, I have recently read his collected poems, in the version translated into Norwegian by my friend Jan Erik Vold. Tranströmer made his debut with the unique collection entitled '17 Poems' in the 1950s. I became familiar with his poetry in the middle of the 1960s because of great enthusiasm from my Norwegian contemporaries.

Witold Gombrowicz: Journals (1953-69)

Earlier this autumn I visited Buenos Aires for literary purposes, and then used the opportunity to read my old literary hero Witold Gombrowicz' journals from his period of residence in Argentina; in fact I dip into them constantly. The Polish avant-garde author arrived in Argentina by chance in the autumn of 1939, as an invited passenger on a Polish passenger ship which was opening up a route between Poland and Argentina. When the ship was due to return, on one of the first days of September 1939, Germany had invaded Poland and the Second World War broken out. Gombrowicz chose to stay in Argentina, and did not go back to Europe until 1963.

Espen Haavardsholm: Visit at Ekely

A newly published novel by my old friend Espen Haavardsholm, dealing with the meeting between the ageing genius Edvard Munch and his very last model, the Norwegian-English student Doffy. The novel builds on documented material from Oslo during the war years. Dorothy, whose real name is suppressed, shared lodgings with a female student friend, who is also drawn into the action of the novel. To the author's great surprise, it turned out that this friend was his own mother.

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Professor Andersen's Night by Dag Solstad, translated by Agnes Scott Langeland, is published by Harvill Secker.

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Here's the challenge: a woman who spends her life writing in libraries must find a way to make the passing of her days sound interesting. Then again, Flaubert said, live like a bourgeois so you can write like a king, or something to that effect.

Today begins, as most of my days do, with a quick look at The New York Times while waiting for the sun to rise so I can take Lucy, the Cairn terrier, for her morning walk. Then it's a run twice around the reservoir in Central Park. Lucy used to jog with me, but at fourteen she's getting a little long in the tooth for more than a few yards. People always assume I named Lucy after my novel Lucy about President Franklin Roosevelt and the great love of his life, Lucy Mercer, but she was already named when she followed me home from a run in the country one day many years ago and kept turning up at the house until her owners gave her to me. Obviously, this was fate. 

Today I go to the Allen Room, a space in the New York Public Library designated for working writers. Though I didn't know it when I first landed a key to the room -- it's locked so you can leave your things in a carrel when you go out for coffee or lunch, and each writer has a shelf for research material -- the room was founded in honor of the late Frederick Allen, author of the classic Only Yesterday and grandfather of my friend, editor and writer Fred Allen. Fred insists, and I have no reason to think the story is apocryphal, that the room was established as a place for his grandfather, who was a chain smoker as well as an exhaustive researcher and prolific writer, to smoke while he worked. I am as opposed to carcinogens as the next woman, but the story does produce a frisson of nostalgia.

After struggling all day with the prologue of the new book - three pages written; two and a half thrown out - I meet my friend Richard Snow for a drink at an arts club near the library. While a high minded performance of Edgar Allen Poe goes on in another room, we huddle in the bar to gossip, grouse about the just past Thanksgiving weekend - a uniquely American holiday celebrating out-of-control eating and shopping -- and talk about the books we're each struggling to begin, his a biography of Henry Ford, mine a novel set against the cultural cold war. Richard tells me an outrageous story about a Christmas Eve that was a turning point in Ford's life, and I insist that is the way he must start his book. I'd like to think the idea was mine, but I know he led me to it, if only unconsciously. The exchange is odd, because neither of us is given to talking in detail about work-in-progress. When we part outside the club, I am thrilled for him, and awash in envy. My prologue has not fallen into place over a glass of pinot grigio.

Tuesday

On the way back from the park this morning, I see what I've come to think of as that picture on the fence of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. By now I should be accustomed to it - I pass but it still enrages. The photo is in an ad for an exhibit at the United Nations. It shows a bunch of African kids gathered excitedly around two computers. A few days ago I asked my husband Stephen if he noticed anything particular about the photograph when he passed it. He said he didn't. I pointed out that all the kids jostling around the computers are boys. There isn't a girl in the picture. I find it strange, or perhaps I don't, that no one associated with the show or the ad picked up on what that picture is saying. A few years ago, my niece Katie read an article about girls in Zimbabwe who were missing school because they had no money for sanitary napkins and could not leave the house when they were menstruating. She started a charity to raise money for them. I have done nothing to combat the story behind this photo. I may be the only grown woman who has a teenager as a role model.

Wednesday

Today I go to the New York Society Library to write. The oldest library in New York, it's run on a subscription basis - you pay a fee to become a member - and housed in a fine old mansion. The writers' room on the top floor used to be a faintly seedy outpost that few people knew about, but two summers ago the space was renovated and word seems to have got out. Now it's quite swanky and packed every day. I suppose it's churlish of me, but I liked it better when it was a down-at-the-heels secret club. Or maybe it's just that I'm still having trouble with the prologue. I tell myself I have been through this with every book I have written. I remind myself I spent months finding the voices for Scottsboro, the novel that was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. But I don't believe it.

I leave the library early in order to be home for a live chat on mumsnet. I'm apprehensive. I have no trouble fielding questions verbally, but will I be able to type that fast? The process turns out to be far easier than I expected and more fun than I dreamed. The group is wonderfully enthusiastic about Next To Love, and the questions are smart and thought-provoking. There's also a strange dynamic. Frequently, when I'm on tour for a book, the book itself seems to take second place to the logistics of the event. Here, we are all intensely focused on the novel, a fabulous experience for a writer.

Thursday

Keeping this diary has made me more aware of how my days are parceled. I spend the first few hours of the morning observing the world. For the rest of the day, I live in my head.
My first perception this morning is Christmas. The decorations have been up for more than a week and the stores are filled with cloying music that stays maddeningly in my mind, but this morning I smell Christmas. Men are unloading a truck full of freshly cut trees in front of the Convent of the Sacred Heart for its annual fund-raising sale. Ninety-first Street is as fragrant as a New England forest. The pleasure is enhanced by the early-morning light that fills the air with gold dust and turns the windows in the apartment houses of Central Park West into blinding mirrors.

On the way back from the park, I make my way against the tide of girls heading to the various private schools in the neighborhood. I cannot help watching them with a novelist's eye. Is this adolescent beauty swinging down the street with such self-assurance doomed to spend the rest of her life remembering her brief moment of glory, like the hero of Irwin Shaw's short story, The Eighty-Yard Run? Will that unhappy looking teenager hiding behind a curtain of hair find a cure for Alzheimer's or write a great novel? Or am I stereotyping? I see an eight-or-nine-year-old swinging hands with her father, chatting excitedly, and I know he is giving her a gift that she will carry all her life. But when I spot a man hurrying along, talking on his mobile, and a girl trotting behind him, trying to keep up, I want to scream, Stop! Pay attention before it's too late.

Then I get to the library and put all these perceptions aside. Or do I? Even when the book is set in another era, the observations and insights of the day creep in.

Friday

Today the characters in the new novel actually breathed once or twice. Too early for celebration, but perhaps occasion for an iota less despair.

Saturday

This is the first time we've been to the house on the Eastern End of Long Island in a month. The trees are bare. I take the leaf blower to the deck; Stephen climbs out on the flat roof to sweep. His joy in rustic chores eludes me, but the man does know how to build a fire. We settle down for a bout of reading in front of it. Later, with a slight assist from me -- he's the weekend chef; I'm the weekday cook -- he makes his fabulous fish stew.

Sunday

Back to the city. When I started this diary, I didn't realize it was going to end with one of my favorite events of the year. Tonight is the Park Avenue Christmas Tree Lighting. Everyone knows about the Rockefeller Center Tree Lighting, a huge televised spectacle that shuts down midtown Manhattan. Natives stay away if they can. But on the first Sunday in December, outside the Brick Church at Park Avenue and 91st Street, a few thousand upper east siders and their friends gather to sing carols and celebrate the illumination of the trees that line the Park Avenue traffic dividers. 

We leave home a little after six. Families are already spilling out of apartment buildings and town houses. Toddlers ride fathers' shoulders. Older children chase one another through the closed-off streets. Amazingly, there are no honking horns, traffic jams, or incidents of road rage. Teenagers try to act blasé, and fail. Adults, one or two in Santa suits, stroll, martinis or eggnogs decorously in hand. Dogs, including Lucy, sensing that something is up, strain at their leashes. It is a John Cheever scene without the dark underbelly.

Led by the minister of the Brick Church, the crowd sings the usual Christmas carols, but an ecumenical spirit hangs in the chill night air. No one threatens law suits because of offending religious symbols or complains about Christ having gone out of Christmas. It is all easy camaraderie and good cheer, until the closing moments.

A bugler steps forward on the church portico, and a hush falls. As the mournful notes of "Taps" float out over the crowd, small children halt their games and dogs prick up their ears. Adults feel a chill down their spines. The last note dies, and the minister utters a short inclusive prayer for peace. Then, one after another, like a wave rushing down the broad avenue as far as the eye can see, and beyond, all the way to 46th Street, the trees on the islands in the road flare to life.

The ritual began in 1945 to pay tribute the fallen of World War II. Now it honors America's dead in every war since, as well as 9/11. Perhaps because I have just published Next To Love, a book about World War II and its aftermath, this year I find the ceremony especially moving. The river of light shines as a beacon of hope in the dark winter night. We have lived through more dire times, it reminds us. And in the spirit of the season, we will endure and go forward.

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Next to Love by Ellen Feldman is published by Picador.
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I found this neglected masterwork in an early Penguin edition. This enhanced the sensual pleasure of reading Faulkner's prose with its long, coiling sentences, descriptive punch - and occasional grammatical incoherence (he often wrote when drunk, admitting to keeping his whiskey "always... within reach"). The novel is constructed from two unconnected stories (separated as novellas in some editions) told in alternate chapters: a passionate yet destructive love affair between a quiet married doctor and a reckless artist in the Deep South of the 1930s, and the picaresque rescue of a woman by a convict during the Mississippi flood of 1927. It is technically bold in form and breathtaking in its lyrical power: "a volume of moving water toppling forward, its crest frothed and shredded like fangs." I scribbled down quotes in my notebook, but they fail to add up to much out of context, only gathering their charge in the current of the whole. The reader's expectation that the two stories will eventually meet up, plot-wise, is never fulfilled, leaving you space to link them thematically and poetically - extremely satisfying.  

Giovanni Verga (Translated by D.H. Lawrence): Little Novels of Sicily

I thought about including these tough, country stories in my top ten English translations for the Guardian, but they would have undermined my point that 'accuracy is the gold standard' even more than the eventual inclusion of Ezra Pound. Lawrence's Italian was not wonderful, he relied too much on the dictionary, and he worked very fast, but his fascination for the great Sicilian's work produced a small masterpiece. Lawrence's Verga could be nobody else's, filled with a fluent energy as it evokes (not without  humour) a pre-modern society trapped not only by its own unflinching traditions in the age of the railway, but by the harsh cruelties of the landscape: 'And the woman looked at the work in hand, at the little stony desolate field, where the earth was white and cracked, because there had been no rain for so long, the water coming all in mist, the mist that rots the seed; so that when the time came to hoe the young corn it was like the devil's beard...' This is a scrabble for survival, in which the donkeys do the work and only the greediest and most ruthless win - until they in turn fall to penury on a whim of chance or weather. 

Richard Jefferies: The Open Air

Jefferies is my favourite naturalist. An eccentric contemporary of Thomas Hardy, he was born on a farm in the hamlet of Coate, in what is now the Swindon edgelands. As it happens, the very fields and ancient woods he so cherished are about to vanish under a vast housing development that no one wants except the developers - unless their imminent appeal fails. I read The Open Air this summer in a 1907 fine-paper Everyman edition bought for a fiver, which enhanced the magical experience of following Jefferies as he walks and explores and effectively chats to himself. At moments anticipating Virginia Woolf's stream-of-consciousness technique, he discusses topics ranging from rooftops and their niche wildlife (starlings, swallows, lichen) to the broad sweeps of his native downland: 'The furze-bushes are lined with thistledown, blown there by a breeze now still; it is glossy in the sunbeams, and the yellow hawkweeds cluster beneath.' His descriptions have the beady-eyed singularity of a pre-Raphaelite painting, but without the Victorian romance: just a passionate love for the natural world and its obscurest corners that remains as fresh as this morning, if accompanied more and more by sorrow for what is already disfigured or lost. 

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Adam Thorpe's new translation of Madame Bovary is published by Vintage Classics.
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To do this, he asked six dying people if perhaps they wouldn't mind dying on an industrial-sized scale. Probably they didn't know they were being asked, or weren't asked, or perhaps through the fug of mortality they saw something of the divine in it all. A white-gowned man hoisting them up like beached dolphins, all those straps, buckles, levers; the slow, serious descent onto a metal platform. Then the waiting. The doctor pacing, clipboard in hand, not exactly wishing them ill but not hospitably begging them to stick around either. Purportedly, God's all about weighing us up, too. As in heaven, so on earth.

Buoyed by his success, Dr Om went on to weigh conveniently expiring sheep and mice and dogs. In all probability, he hastened their release. Poisoned sheep, he found, have souls. Dogs do not.

But what of novels? Specifically, the long novel, the Biblical doorstoppers and thousand-page self-designed masterworks. This thought that occurred to me while trying to find a comfortable position to enter the carpal tunnel of Hungarian novelist, Péter Nádas' 1,133-page Parallel Stories. Just what sort of damage would such a baggy monster unleash when let loose upon a Kindle or iPad, and, specifically, would one be able to notice any weight difference after downloading it? Not being able to afford a Kindle or a friend with a Kindle, let alone an atomic scale, I queried Wikipedia. Wikipedia's verdict? Probably not. Which isn't to say there wouldn't be some weight gain. The rather Pynchonianly named, Laszlo Kish at Texas A&M University, for example, wrote a paper I couldn't quite understand about weight fluctuations in information storage media, his conclusion being that gravity is extraordinarily weird and information has mass. Just not a whole lot of it.

I wouldn't say this about any other book, but Parallel Stories needs to be held. It is an extraordinary and fleshy thing.

Look at it. Paw the thing, slap it down on a podium, flip through it. Conceive of its first and last page: look at them together. Proof it begins, proof it ends. Because you're going to need this, to rely on those kind of physical temporality markers once you enter into Nádas' world. Pity the e-reader waiting, finger-flick after finger-flick, for a coherent old-fashioned plot to coagulate around the brilliant, actively digressive time warp of characters, epochs and themes. There's no such tug here. Eugenics, post-Wall Berlin underwear fetishism, homosexual restroom orgies in Communist Budapest, police - both secret and otherwise, hatless Jewish lumber merchants, romantic German art, 100-page sex scenes ending not in mutual orgasm but mutual urination, dismembered bodies hanging from World War I trees, opera singing, pre-war Hungarian architecture, taxi-driving former fascist aristocrats, bread lines being shelled by Soviet tanks, elderly lesbians playing board and mind games, an unsolved murder (also involving designer underwear), and that's just for starters. It'd feel bottomless without the old-fashioned reliability of finite paper pages. It'd feel like a possession, your Kindle self-creating a never-ending series of incidents, connections, hyper-linked characters and wonderingly realized time periods. The Kindle berserk with a novel as wayward and intermeshed as the internet itself. But holding Parallel Stories in your hand will give it shape, a way in, a necessary body - and what a body. The dust jacket features what looks like a distorted funhouse image of a young, naked Margaret Thatcher, her mouth agape and elongated into a Edvard Munch-like scream, her hands privatizing her property. I didn't notice Mrs Thatcher in the novel, which isn't to say that she wasn't there. I'm probably in there. You are, too. Frankly, I enjoyed the idea: an entire universe embedded inside a nubile grotesque of Margaret Thatcher.

Parallel Stories took 18 years to write and 5 more to translate into English - masterfully, it should be said, by Imre Goldstein. The proof copy I have even has the dreaded 'new War and Peace' albatrossed across its cover. (New War and Peaces in literary terms being as reliable as 'new Dylan' in the musical - critical short-hand for a weighty book with hundreds of characters and historical trauma involving fire. I mean, even War and Peace itself gets the 'new War and Peace' treatment every decade or so - see the stunning 2007 Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation and its accompanying fanfare.) No, Nadas, at 69 years old, has created something far more original than that, his company less Tolstoy and the Russian realists and more the tree-devouring works of Mann, Joyce, Robert Musil and even Henry Miller. It's a book that seems effortlessly post-modern, nothing signposted or done for experiment's sake; with the inhuman coolness of the professional acrobat, the prose can turn on a dime, tumble from third to first person, from long sentences to poetry-like spins of single lines and back again. No sweat. The effect is enlivening in that ineffable way that only great literature can be; it re-teaches you how to read as you read. This is what novels can still do. Structurally, it's like fantasy literature in a sense; the reader presented with so many interconnected times and characters that you have to give in to the rules of this fictional world before being able to traverse through it. (It might be noted that the fantasy/sci-fi genre is one of the only ones that can still get away with publishing 1000-page novels to impressive sales - I suppose there's something inherently wordy in the creation of worlds, whether they include dragons or cottaging homosexuals in Communist Budapest.) 

But where sometimes a book of this length and, sure, difficulty, can take time to get your claws into, Nádas had me on the first page and this near-perfect seduction of a sentence: 'He was like a blade, though he could not tell of what, perhaps of a razor or an icy thought, but of that he said nothing.'

Or try a longer excerpt. This concerns the transport of Hungarian children to some undefined Communist camp; neither the children nor their parents know exactly where or why, the ingeniously stuttered will of the State is all.

The impassive, almost bored female voice coming from the loudspeakers kept repeating for long minutes that in compliance with the orders of the station inspectors, for security reasons the departure hall would be closed before the trains' departure, therefore parents and relatives, tives, were asked immediately to vacate, cate, the railway station.

    Tation. Tion.

    But the crowd would not move.

    Children hanging out the train windows were waving, yelling, and the long complicated sentence kept echoing, maddening and incomprehensible. The throng of excited parents and relatives was now packed into the open space between the entrance of the glass-covered departure hall and the end of the platforms; they stretched, waved, and screamed from there, though it made no sense to wait until we'd leave.

    The loud bubbling of a dark mass.

    Outside, Baross Square was sizzling in the sunshine.

    Bullet marks on the facade of the glass-covered hall had been repaired in the first months after the fighting, but the station's domed roof was still gaping with holes, and the hot sunshine pouring through them in enormous beams created a veritable curtain between us.

    It was dazzling.

Note the way Nádas' eyes - and ears - flick between history, past and ever-present, the bullets in the facade outside and the 'bubbling mass' inside, from the first person to some all-knowing third. His immediacy and lightness of touch. It is dazzling.

Parallel Stories may or may not have a soul, but it certainly has a body. The novel stinks. It seethes and shits and breathes and fucks and smells its own fingers. It's perhaps the most corporeal novel I've ever read, and near revolutionary in its bodily weight, in the way it makes you uncomfortably aware of your own flesh and its inner-workings as you read. The exhaustive descriptions of character are built not from the head down, but from their bodies up and out into history. The anti-Mann, in that sense. (A drinking game could be played using the word 'bulb' in reference to the erect penis, by the way - if anyone ever decided to hold a hoot of a Parallel Stories reading party.) I want to use the word 'brave' in the way Nádas creates a literature of history as formed through the impermanent bodies that run through it, but 'true' would be closer to the mark. It is uncomfortable and filthy and occasionally tiresome, but so is life and the unending and unknowable needs of our bodies. In Parallel Stories the characters aren't only slaves to the state and history but to their own corporeality, which they try and try and fail and try again to grapple with. The tragedy always seems to start from within. No matter what the social or historical weather happens to be, there's never a constant, only human bodies, thousands of characters trying to make sense of themselves from within it all.

But in the end, what's most shocking about Péter Nádas' novel is simply that it exists. Time and time again, while reading, this other thought occurred to me, and then enraged and depressed me: here is a book that would never, ever be published if it was written by an unknown English or American author. Its synopsis, being more or less impossible to condense, is made of the most scoffable stuff. Imagine what an American edit of such a novel would look like - "There's a decent 250-page novel in here, maybe four of them, Mr Nádas, why don't you try to tell your stories like that? I like the murder mystery part, why don't you ever try to solve it? The orgies we could probably lose." No way this would this ever slip through the cautious gates of agents and marketing and the industry if it wasn't by an elder statesman of European literature. Could Parallel Stories be the last great European novel in the 20th century's mould? I hope not. But thinking about the now-internalised constraints we novelists place on ourselves; the Stockholm syndrome we all more or less suffer from in order to be a part of the publishing world, well, it could just be the last of that grand, dying breed. Today's English-writing novelists are safe in a zoo - and we're happy there. We're fed meagerly, but we occasionally get petted. There are cocktail parties. Because what choice do we have if we want a career? We're convinced the public that comes to visit want us entertaining and topical, concise and good at giving what they want, which is what they know, challenging in ways our zookeepers may find occasionally eccentric or marketably perverse but never too time-consumingly difficult. The wayward, crotchety animals are old and, apparently, kept safely away in places like Hungary. Maybe Latvia. They'll be dead soon, anyway. (And those hopeful whispers going cage to cage about our zookeepers being overrun by the 'new media' are intriguing but ultimately flimsy when it comes to books like Parallel Stories, anyway. Books like this - just like the works of Joyce, Woolf, Mann, etc. - need an industry-supported platform. Great art still needs patrons, and would certainly fair even worse in the ADD world of self-publishing. We're our own zookeepers now: meet the new boss, same as the old.) Normally I bristle at reports of new writing being too flimsy, inward-gazing or beholden to the industry. But even the most daring novels of our generation, like David Foster Wallace's magnificent Infinite Jest, are only allowed to be daring in a manner that is also entertaining - and entertaining in a manner understood by the constricts of the market. There's little overt humour in Parallel Stories, and no irony. That, in and of itself, began to seem revolutionary. Are we now so afraid of high, pure, unsweetened art? I'm not exactly sure, and nor am I sure what kind of audience awaits Péter Nádas' new book.

Part of me thinks: it doesn't fucking matter. It exists. It is supported by a major publishing house. For that be thankful.

But another part of me despairs. Kindle or no, this book is mammoth, and needs a lot of space to breathe.

And, yes, this season's got a few such elephants marching into the book store - or rather, the Amazon shipping bay. There's The Instructions by Adam Levin, a 1,030-page answer to the unasked question of what it'd be like to spend 1,030 pages with a Jonathan Safran Foer character - or Jonathan Safran Foer himself - which is either as delightful or face-peelingly exasperating as that sounds. But foremost, of course, there's Murakami's 1Q84, so large it's been published in two hardbacks. I know many people I respect who stand by Murakami, but personally I've always found his prose so flat and sloppily repetitive, his weirdness so rote and bloodless, that I'm still waiting for someone to come out and say our understanding of his novels depend on some retrograde, borderline racist understanding of Japanese culture. Like: well, it's supposed to be so dull and artlessly 'weird'; and, boy, aren't they interesting and cute, those Japanese? The way they're always cooking and talking to supernatural beings and thinking about classical music? OK, not an argument I could or would want to make, not here anyway - but let's put it out there anyway. Murakami cultists, there's something to be said for short books, too. I'd start with Philip K. Dick. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Meaning, I suppose, there's weight and then there's weight. Like a lover or your own personal history, Péter Nádas' Parallel Stories contains more than you can conceivably take from it. It is heavy in all ways. Or, as Steve Jobs said before transmitting his 21 grammes into the ether: 

"Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow."

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All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall be Well by Tod Wodicka is published by Jonathan Cape. He lives in Berlin where he is working on his second novel, The Household Spirit.
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This is a pleasingly mysterious question. Does it mean where am I physically right now - at the instant of your asking or at the instant of my answering? Or where am I metaphorically speaking right now - meaning in the current phase of my life? I will try to respond in all senses: At the instant of your asking the question (in an email yesterday), I was on my way out the door for a planning meeting with the American Women's Club in Denmark which has invited me to do a presentation and reading next February. At the instant of my answering (now), I am in my little east side Copenhagen apartment, sitting on my brick-red sofa where I do much of my writing. Where am I, metaphorically speaking, in the current phase of my life? In a good place, where I am feeling physically and spiritually better than I have in some years, feeling as though I have more control over my life, contemplating future projects, enjoying my work - writing, translating poetry (mostly, some prose) from the Danish, teaching a bit (for the master of fine arts program at Fairleigh Dickinson University), travelling, putting the finishing touches on my new & selected stories, and planning two book-length projects. 

Where do you write?
Actually, anywhere. In good weather I love to sit in the sunshine in an outdoor café here in Copenhagen, writing and sipping a pint or two - for example, on Kultorvet (the Coal Square) where Søren Kierkegaard once lived and where the White Lamb pub was shelled by the Duke of Wellington in 1807. This past summer was so sunless, however, that my doctor has me taking vitamin D pills. I also like to write on airplanes, particularly trans-oceanic flights, and on trains or buses. But mostly I write on my red sofa, seated all the way to the right with my pad resting on the wide flat armrest in my tiny, ground-floor apartment on the east side of Copenhagen, surrounded by the paintings hanging on my walls, collected over many years, and from time to time I exchange a glance with the abstract faces in those pictures. The disadvantage to that is there are fewer living external inspirations than there are in an outdoor café; the advantages are there is quiet and access to all my books and the internet and my dictionaries. A mix of all these places is where I write.

How do you write?
The first draft always by hand, sometimes in long hand, sometimes - when the words are coming fast - in short hand (Gregg system, which I learned in the army in the '60s to work in the White House - but that's another story). Around 1994 I was on a trans-Atlantic flight where among the items offered in the 'Sky Shop' was a beautiful Montblanc ballpoint pen.  It cost about $300, but as soon as I took pen in hand I knew it was the only pen for me, never again would I write with a Bic or a Cross or a Parker. I purchased it (causing my wife to mutter a bit) but have never regretted that purchase. In 2009, after about 15 books and many scores of stories, essays and translations, that pen broke, literally. The barrel cracked, and it was irreparable. So I went out and bought another just like it. I love that Montblanc. It sits just so in my hand, beautifully balanced, and when the refill is about to run dry, it gets skimpy with the ink for a few words, but then comes in strong again, and you know you have a page or two to go before it runs fully dry. It's a warning system, you see. That Montblanc is my literary partner.

What keeps you writing?
That I'm never done. When I started out, I was particularly inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky who, when he was 18 years old, wrote in his journal, "Man is a mystery. This mystery must be solved, and even if you pass your entire life solving it, do not say you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery because I want to be a man." In a slight variation on that, I write because I want to discover what it is to be a human being - or more precisely, what it is to be me. I view that subject through a different angle each time I start writing, and I am beginning to suspect that the number of angles is infinite. Or in any event, less finite than my life. I have been writing for 50 years this year - decided I wanted to write in 1961, the same year that Hemingway shot himself and when I turned 17. At that time I thought, well he had a good long life. He was 61. Now I am 67 and it is 50 years later, and I am far from done. Incidentally, Robert Coover wrote a short story in 1961 titled 'Beginnings', which begins something like, "In order to get started, he went to live on an island and shot himself in the head. His blood, unable to resist a final joke, spattered on the walls, spelling out the words, 'It is important to begin when everything is over.'"

Who do you write for?
Well I write for everyone and no one. I write for myself mostly as well as for the pretty girl in first grade who never poured me a smile or a glance. I hope that whoever might read my stuff will respond in their hearts, but who knows how many people even read the work.If I am published in a magazine with, say 5,000 or 10,000 or 20,000 subscribers or in a newspaper with 500,000, who knows how many of the readers of those magazines or papers will actually read my piece, or my book that may have been reviewed in that literary magazine or that newspaper? Yet sometimes one is surprised; I was contacted by a high school speech teacher from the American southwest a couple of years ago to tell me that she had been using a story she read of mine in 1990 as a reading interpretation piece for her students for nearly 20 years.A friend, the writer and artist Gladys Swan, once said that she feels her stories pass through her on their way someplace else.That is how I felt when that teacher contacted me - my story had passed through me to her and to many - maybe hundreds, maybe thousands - of her students and maybe it passed through some of them to even more people. You can kill a singer with violence, but the only way to kill a song is by not singing it until it is forgotten. John Updike once said he writes for the person who will discover an old dusty copy of one of his books on the back shelves of a library. Who knows for whom we write? We sing and hope someone will hear the song and be pleased and moved by it.

Do you discuss your work with anyone?
When I have a draft of a piece that is showable, I will send it to one or two or three trusted writer friends who will respond honestly and with care to me just as I would do for them with their work. Of course, I just want to make sure that the piece will not embarrass me in the world and hope that they will say, "This is brilliant!  Don't change a word!". But sometimes they have suggestions, and sometimes those suggestions are good and useful. Sometimes those suggestions indicate to me that they didn't understand what I was trying to do - so I will try again to do it. As Beckett said, "Try. Fail. Try again. Fail better."

How do you know if your work is good?

I don't, really. If my trusted readers say they like it, I feel encouraged. If readers and reviewers and critics like it, I feel encouraged. But even if they don't like it, I know usually that I have done the best I could. For 20 years - between the ages of 17 and 37 - I wrote without getting published. I had encouragement - from teachers, from an agent, hyperbolic editorial praise in rejection letters, a grant for a novel-in-progress - but nothing published for 20 years. I tried to give up, but I couldn't. I even sold all my fiction books to an antiquarian book dealer to rid my life of fiction and its disappointments, but I found myself buying them back for 5 or 10 times the price he gave me for them and then I knew I was in it for life. Strangely, though, when I wrote my next story, after I had written about 4 or 5 pages, I knew that this would be the first story I would get published - and that turned out to be true. And it went much faster then - half a dozen stories a year leading to books leading to a score of books, etc. Does that mean my work is good - because it gets published?  I don't know. When Bloomsbury picked me up two years ago, when they put my books on the world market instead of the small press market, I was heartened. I had concluded by then that I was just a small-press writer, but suddenly I was a large-press writer, and I was grateful to have my novels out in the beautiful editions that Bloomsbury produces and available to the whole English-speaking world. Does that make me a better writer than I was earlier? Are novelists who sell far more than I do necessarily better writers than I am? Or those who sell far fewer than I do - are they not as good? Time will tell.  Which reminds me of something that Stanley Elkin said about the test of time, "Don't take the test."

Do you have any unwritten characters in mind?

They are legion. But I have not yet discovered the unwritten ones. I don't discover a character until I begin to write him or her. Bernardo Greene or Michela Ibsen in my novel In the Company of Angels did not exist for me until I discovered them by following them in words.  The dozen characters in Falling Sideways did not exist for me until I began to shape them into language; then they became my constant companions for the time it took me to write the novel - they were with me, all around me, in the morning when I rose and they were nestled inside my mind when I lay down to sleep at night. I trust that I will meet new characters when I sit to write, and they might be sparked into life by a scrap of conversation I might overhear, by the look in someone's eye, by a smile or a more complex expression on a stranger's face, by a twist of language... In every mote of sunlight is a mood which might become a character.

Which book do you wish you'd written?
So many. Dostoyevsky's The Possessed. Camus' The Stranger. Camus's Caligula (a play) - for that matter, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. But how can one wish to be a genius who existed 2500 years ago?! I think that those three works are the epitome of what I seek to do in my writing - they are at once so mysterious and so clear. I try to be as clear as I can when I write, but how can you be perfectly lucid about the ambiguity of reality? As the great American poet Jack Gilbert once said, "There is also the danger of making something clearer than it is."

What is your literary guilty pleasure?
The tabloids. The Sun, The Mirror, New York Post, New York Daily News...  In Copenhagen, Ekstra Bladet and B.T. These are the contemporary versions of the late medieval ballads of death and treachery and sex and murder. So I feel guilty when I fly back from New York to Copenhagen and reach the newspaper display just as I am climbing into the plane and my hand goes for the New York Post instead of the New York Times and B.T. instead of Politiken, but I read those estimable papers daily - only on crossing the ocean in the sky can I allow myself two tabloids and a double vodka on the rocks!  Look at the pictures of scantily clad young women, read the horoscopes ("...your relationship is going through bad weather...") peep at the latest scandals and murders.

Which writer made you want to write?

The writer immediately responsible was Katherine Mansfield. One night when I was 17 years old, I read Mansfield's Miss Brill, and became infuriated at how badly this poor old woman had been treated. I decided to write a letter to the author - who I considered responsible for Miss Brill's unhappiness - chastizing her, but looking at the biographical note on the book, I learned that Katherine Mansfield had died about 40 years before. I was stunned. It was as though she had reached out of the grave to touch my heart. And I decided that I wanted to try to do that, too. From that moment on, I was a writer, wanted more than anything else to be a writer. But this is also due to the fact that I had been reading insatiably since I was 15 and my father gave me a copy of Dostoyevsky's Crime & Punishment. By good fortune, there was nothing on television that night, so I read the book and was instantly hooked on reading serious fiction. I read all of Dostoyevsky, one right after the other, then I turned to - for some reason - most of John Steinbeck, then most of Aldous Huxley, some George Orwell, Dylan Thomas, James Joyce (who made an enormous impact) and kept reading. So all of the writers that I had read in those two years up until my decision that I wanted to try to be a writer also contributed to my decision.

Who's the most exciting author writing today?
This question has to be in plural - authors - because there are so many, and I hesitate to answer it because invariably I will forget to name some of the exciting ones, so I respond with reservations and in no particular order: Duff Brenna, Junot Dìaz, Andre Dubus III, John Barth, Robert Coover, William H. Gass, Kristian Bang Foss, Francois Camoin, Lance Olsen, W. D. Wetherell, Martin Espada, David Daniel, Tim Seibles, Charles Simic, Henrik Nordbrandt, Gladys Swan, Line-Maria Lång, Dorthe Nors... However, there are so many exciting authors in the history of literature who are as exciting as if they just wrote what they wrote today, though they may have written it 100 or a thousand or two thousand years ago. I won't begin to name all my favorites of the past who continue to occupy my heart, soul and brain today.

If you weren't writing you'd be...?
Writing. As mentioned I spent 20 years writing and not getting published but I kept on writing.  So even if I wasn't writing, I would be writing. R. M. Rilke in his wonderful book Letters to a Young Poet says you have to look into your heart and ask yourself if you must write. If your answer is no, then you have saved yourself a lot of grief of trying to do something which is not imperative for you. But if your answer is yes, then you have saved yourself the grief of trying not to do what is imperative for you. He also said that a tree in winter appears to be lifeless, but in truth it is gathering its saps and its force to bloom in the spring. Sometimes a writer is like that. In any event, my answer to that question was yes. I had to. I cannot imagine myself not writing.

What next?

Falling Sideways, the second in my Copenhagen Quartet, four independent novels about the souls and seasons of the Danish capital, has been published in London this month (following the paperback of In the Company of Angels which Bloomsbury put out earlier this year). I am in process of completing a CD of myself reading my translations of the Danish cult poet Dan Turèll in a musical cooperation with the Danish movie composer Halfdan E. Later I plan to rewrite a book I published about fifteen years ago in a small press version as The Book of Angels. The rewrite will be titled The Book of Silence. It is a kind of literary horror novel about a black magician who captures and cages an artist in order to employ his imagination in the magician's pursuit of necromancy.

I will continue to travel - many reading and teaching tours every year throughout the U.S. and Europe. Also I want to spend more time with my grandson, Leo Kennedy-Rye, who turned two years old three days before Bloomsbury released the British version of Falling Sideways - the novel is dedicated to him and his parents (and a few others). And I am trying to stay healthy in order to see as much of his young life unfold as I can.

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Falling SIdeways by Thomas E. Kennedy is published by Bloomsbury.
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"I think I'd have to say that I was inspired to write by reading," she declares. "I'd always just read and read. I was born in Egypt and lived there until I was twelve so I was educated at home. My education was reading. So yes, my writing sprang from reading. Obviously not every voracious reader is a writer, but I've never known any writer who wasn't a voracious reader, it goes with the job."

She explains that although she began by writing for children, this is now all in the past.

"Sadly," she says, "the children's stories packed up on me a long time ago, I haven't written one for about 25 years."

Was there a particular reason for this, did it coincide with her own children growing up?

"They just left me," she answers. "I no longer think of myself as a children's writer. I'm a lapsed children's writer. A once-children's writer."

On discovering that their grandmother used to write children's books, her then eleven-year-old grandchild offered her expertise as a reader of any new work.

"I didn't try it though," Lively chuckles. "I just knew that the spark had gone. There's no point in flogging a dead horse."

"Short stories don't come anymore either," she continues. "It's been almost ten years since I wrote one. Before that I was constantly writing short stories alongside long fiction. I can't account for it. I guess some aspect of writing leaves you. I miss the short stories though, because it's an intensely difficult form, and a very satisfying one."

"They have something in common with writing for children," she adds. "They require the same economy and precision - you must grab the reader in the first line or paragraph. There's no room for slack in either, not that there's room for slack in the novel exactly, but I'm thinking of what Graham Greene said about linking passages - sections of the novel where there's a slowing down of pace or a ticking over - in a short story the whole conception has to be right, you can't just wander off into nowhere."

So how does she attack the writing process? Is it something that comes easily?

"Novels are very hard work," she replies, "like hacking away at the rock face. They're hard graft. I have always enjoyed them, but I always have a period when I don't know where it's going and I get stuck. I don't start short stories if I don't know where they're going - I would have conceived it as an entity before I started it - but I start a novel with only the framework in place and then it's the filling in where you can get stuck."

How It All Began opens with the mugging of retired schoolteacher Charlotte Rainsford on a London street. The fallout of this seemingly minor event then sends ripples across a variety of lives, some close to Charlotte, some not so much, the novel is the story of what happens because of this one event.

"Our own lives are buffeted from one contingency to another," she remarks. "You think you've planned your day and then it gets knocked aside because you didn't wear a helmet and you fall off your bicycle. History is the same - contingent events knock things sideways. Politicians think they can anticipate what happens, but can they really? The difference between choice and contingency has always interested me hugely, and history is just a mass of countries and people thinking they're making choices, but then being knocked sideways by some contingent event."

Does this mean there are similarities between the novelist and the historian?

"What the novelist is doing," she declares, "is imposing a pattern on events, but life doesn't really have a pattern. A novel is a contrivance; life isn't like that at all. So yes, there are similarities in that historians are trying to find a pattern in the events that have happened. It goes back to the perennial historical questions such as what were the causes of the First World War or the French Revolution, etc?"

Her earlier book Making It Up (2005) is a pseudo-autobiographical work that explores the roads not taken by the author.

"That," she states, "is a book that you can only write in old age once you can look back and think what if?" She found it "very alarming" to realise that the majority of the major decisions in life are made when one is still quite young. "Perhaps it was my lack of career path as such, but all these decisions clustered before I was thirty. You can't regret the roads not taken, because you don't know whether these might have led to something worse happening, but as a story-teller you can't resist trying to make up the stories of what might have been."

If she could go back and speak to her twenty-five year old self what advice would she give herself?

"I think it would have to be to never pass up an opportunity - and I think I probably haven't in a way - seize the day, do what you can when you can, try everything - I think I almost always have, I mean I've been chicken occasionally, but not really. I do have one or two regrets in relationships though. Remember that it is very difficult to repair relationships," she warns me wisely.

Changing the topic, I explain that I'm eager to know what she made of the controversy surrounding this year's Man Booker Prize. She sheepishly admits that the only shortlisted title she's read is the Barnes, and only after he'd won. But, having followed the press coverage, she does admit that she thinks Stella Rimington, the chair of the judging panel, perhaps did herself a disservice when it came to the focus on 'readability'.

"It was probably a word that slipped out," she considers, "but the 'rattling good read' comment was fatuous. There are some very good books that aren't easy to read - the fault might not be with the book, but actually with oneself. There are great books that I've had trouble with, Ulysses for example."

What then does she think about the plans afoot for a competitive award in the form of the Literature Prize?

"I don't like the idea of this polarisation," she says. "It will suggest that the Booker is all about readability, but it's important to remember that the Booker has done huge things over the years to get more people to read more challenging and interesting books than they would have otherwise done. I think it would be a terrible shame if that kind of publicity were lost. So all in all, I feel very ambivalent about it."

She's written so many different stories, and been so successful with each of the different genres that she's used, so does she see a different Penelope Lively writing each time? 

"Well in a way, yes," she replies. "I look at Moon Tiger now and think 'somebody else wrote that'. But then again I was somebody else then - it was another incarnation of me before lots of experience happened. My favourite work is probably my children's story, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe. I still get letters from children about it now."

She goes on to make the interesting distinction between what she calls "lived experience" and "intellectual experience", the latter, for her at least, having been "reading above all".

"Looking back over a lifetime at my age, I've realized how much I've been formed by reading. When I wrote Moon Tiger there was an awful lot I hadn't yet read. The person I am - it's an intellectual climb as much as the product of things that have happened to me along the way."

And how much of herself does she put into her books?

"Obviously you puts bits of yourself in, an arm or a leg," she chuckles. "But to go back to Claudia for example, the only bit of me I put into her was her interest in history, otherwise she's nothing like me - if only! She's much more feisty than I am, much more upfront. I'd have loved to have been more like Claudia."

What about the classic mantra chanted to aspiring novelists: 'write what you know'?

"If you only write out of personal experience it's far too limiting," she declares. "You start with gender limitations, but you can't write only as a woman, you have to make the imaginative leap and be able to write from a man's point of view, from a different age point of view, etc. I must admit that that's one good thing about getting older. You've been there and done that. In Moon Tiger I have Claudia dying at the age of seventy-six, and I was only about fifty when I wrote it so I didn't know what it was like to be seventy-six, but I do now. Once you're old you've been through every age, so although you might not have the experience fresh in your mind, you still know what's it like to be twenty-six or thirty-six or forty-six, and that's incredibly useful."

"I mean," she continues, "if you only wrote novels from the perspective of things that had happened to you, my goodness you'd be writing dull novels. And it works the other way too. After I'd written Perfect Happiness (a novel about widowhood) I received letters from women saying I must have had exactly the same experience as them, and I felt hypocritical having to write back to them and say, actually, no."

Now a widow herself, there's "no way now I would want to write about the experience of losing a husband. For example, Charlotte in How It All Began has lost her husband, but the experience of it happening doesn't come into the book. As a writer you want to get away from just writing about what you know. To go back to short stories for example, they always arose from something heard, something observed, something seen, but then danced off in a completely different direction that had no personal relevance to me."

Considering she charts her own trajectory as a novelist - from initial inspiration to continual intellectual experience - in terms of the books she reads, I'm interested to find out what and who she enjoys reading. Does she have any favourite authors? Are there novelists, or novels, that she returns to again and again?

"I'm an enormous Golding fan," she replies. "I read and re-read him."

Describing him as a "shape-shifting" novelist, she explains that each time she re-visits one of his novels she finds "a different stratum" that she hadn't seen there before. But it's not Lord of the Flies that she finds herself returning to again and again, but rather The Inheritors. Henry James' What Maisie Knew was also "seminal in terms of teaching me what a novel can do. It's so extraordinary, because you're looking over Maisie's shoulder - though I've never quite believed she's only seven, she seems more like nine or ten, but I suppose James didn't really know children - looking at the appalling behaviour of the adults around her and you're made to feel almost complicit in this because you understand the events you're watching whereas she doesn't. It's an extraordinary manipulation of the reader."

She then goes on to talk about her love of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, where "again, you're manipulated because of the gradual trickle of information. Your perspective changes when you discover some new factor you hadn't realised before."

"I re-read John Updike with huge pleasure," she continues, "and am also a great fan of Ian McEwan when it comes to that generation of writers. For me, he can hardly put a foot wrong."

What about younger authors? Has she read any debut novels of late that she really admired? She immediately recalls Rebecca Hunt's Mr Chartwell.

"It's very rare that something really grabs me, but that one did," she says. "I get sent so many things, and do keep an eye on what's being published, but most of them aren't doing that thing of you stop reading one evening because you want to leave more for tomorrow."

I admit I didn't feel the same way about Hunt's novel, and we talk about it for a while, each conceding our ground a little. 

As she we say goodbye, she repeats her concern that I'm cycling without a helmet. I head off down the road thinking about the 'what ifs', keeping a keener eye than usual on the traffic around me.

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How It All Began by Penelope Lively is published by Penguin Books.
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On Monday morning I got up early and left the house on my bike. I cycled across North London to Angel for an appointment with [not for publication] and then I wasted a little time at a coffee shop on Essex Rd run by an Italian woman who likes to stack pastry by the front counter. The stacks were gorgeous: blueberry muffins upon blueberry muffins. There was nothing in the café that resembled the usual limp London fare.

I had to conduct an interview so I checked my Oyster card and it seemed to be all right. It was not going to die. I keep a lot of loose double A batteries in my bag. They're supposed to be fresh but I'm always suspicious. I sometimes buy new double A batteries for my recorder just to know they're new, just so I can take them out of the packaging. I never like sitting down with someone fascinating and worrying about the state of my batteries. I never want to look down and see the red light flashing. When the recorder dies, I always have to start scratching more and more in my notebook. The spell is broken. I lose the cadence and flow, and the bounty, the overspill, the beautiful expressions. One of my heroes, Gay Talese, absolutely hates recorders. I understand he thinks recorders weaken a reporter's powers of observation. I take his point. Still, I like the way they capture the flow of voice.

So I end up purchasing a lot of batteries on Mondays. This Monday was no different. In the evening I met up with [not for publication] and [not for publication] at a Spanish restaurant.

Tuesday

On Tuesday morning I waited for the bus. My girlfriend bought me a banana as we walked past the fruit seller at Finsbury Park tube station. For ages she bought a single banana each day from this fruit seller. Now that she occasionally bought two bananas it seemed their relationship had changed. I forgot to ask her for the banana before she disembarked. A text from her later told me she'd eaten the two bananas. I bought my own banana for lunch.

I attempted to work. My work consisted mostly of what I'm doing right now: writing in a Claire Fontaine notebook and taking breaks to watch Vancouver Canucks highlights online, perhaps too often, especially 'the Burrows goal'. (Those who know it, know it). I'm not a big sports fan, but I feel calm and light when I watch the Burrows goal, so I watch it about five times a day, at intervals spread equally through the morning and afternoon, always while facing Vancouver. It gives my life structure. Perhaps the optimistic feeling comes from the sight of men in giant pads and facemasks hugging each other and jumping up and down on ice, which is not easy.

In the evening I met with my friend Joe Pickering and tried to explain why I forgot to mention him in the acknowledgements of my book. I couldn't find a good reason, so I vowed to myself to mention his name as much as possible in subsequent articles, as if six online mentions of Joe Pickering were somehow equal to one mention of Joe Pickering in a book. I'm still unsure of the real exchange rate.

Wednesday

Today I dealt with a few issues surrounding my book including [not for publication] and [not for publication]. (I'm going to start substituting Joe's name in those instances.) I ate a sandwich from Pret a Manger and thought, not for the first time, about who made the sandwich and whether or not I'd unwittingly eaten another of their sandwiches during some earlier lunch hour. I have no idea how Pret operates but I once did hear about the enormous industrial assembly of airline food and I spoke, off the record, to a few employees who make that sort of food for [Joe Pickering] and who must slog through so much butter spreading each day. They spread more butter in a day than I will spread in my life. I should definitely make my own lunch more often. I have had this exact same thought, every single Wednesday for the past ten years.

In the evening I gave a talk about my latest book. I had been asked to perform alongside Diana Athill, a woman who speaks off the cuff in the most gorgeous, well-composed, grammatically sound sentences I've ever heard. The evening was hosted by Damian Barr. He's a great interviewer and I don't think he worries about batteries in the same way I do.

Thursday

I work in an office on Thursdays and each week I forget my security pass, so I have to ask the receptionist at the front entrance to let me in. I feel ashamed but she always tries to make me feel better by implying that many employees in the building are as congenitally absent-minded. She also tries to make me feel better by describing encounters with people who have walked past her desk, which in the past week included Pippa Middleton. And? I asked. She was nice, the receptionist replied. And? I asked. She was dressed beautifully in a very conservative way, the receptionist replied. And? I asked, but the receptionist had already opened the door with her security pass and was looking at me as if to say, Get to work, it's nearly 10:30, so I don't get to hear much more about Pippa Middleton. I'm aware of the time I arrive at work. I am only contractually obliged to work seven hours a week for [Joe Pickering] so I'm not too worried about walking in at 10:30am. I stay late.

Friday

I fly to Greece. I took five years to write a book about London that was little more than an outsider's effort to understand the city so I know I won't gain a full understanding of Athens in a couple days. That said, some of the signs are hard to ignore. All the casings of the pillars in front of a building facing Syntagma Square have been stripped and I'm told these chunks of marble are what protesters threw at the police as they showed their disdain for the proposed austerity measures. My hotel is next to the Greek EU building. Outside it sits a box holding a security guard. The reflective glass of the box has been smashed with what must have been a hammer. On Friday, Greek prime minister George Papandreou was somewhere in the country planning a referendum that would send the markets into turmoil the following week. But that hadn't happened yet.

Saturday

When I'm at home I try to write five pages a day in my notebook. It works out to about 370 words. I've been failing lately for various reasons but each morning is a fresh chance to capture those words. When I'm out of the country I tend to write lists. The following is my list from Saturday. Dogs asleep on Kolokotroni; dogs asleep in Syntagma Square; missing marble; cold mini-bar Toblerone; the Acropolis; pine trees; sunset on marble; a Greek flag flapping in the wind; the white sprawl of Athens; my brother emailing Instagram photos from his iPhone; proper dusk; the Acropolis suddenly lit with theatrical lighting.

Is the lighting of the Acropolis on a timer? How big is that timer? Is it anything like the timer I have at my place? Is it done manually? I work regularly at the London Library and I always thought the announcement that the library was closing was pre-recorded until I stood and watched one of the librarians speak it out with eloquence and precision.

My Greek list continues: dogs asleep on the steps of the Acropolis; new immigrants selling Louis Vuitton-ish stuff; tourist t-shirts on hangers; tourist t-shirts that read 'This Is Sparta' when it's not, it's Athens.

Sunday

I tell myself to read one book at a time but I rarely stick to that rule. I finished reading Boomerang by Michael Lewis and, not long after, finished reading Homeboy by H.M. Naqvi. I found a copy of Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis in the library of an old hotel and read the first twenty pages but then left it behind. I should have brought it along but it was one of only a few English books. The bookshelf was dominated by French, Spanish and Greek literature, so I left Babbitt in the hopes it would be read by the next Sinclair Lewis fan to arrive in the small village of Lefkes. (My brother and I left Athens in the morning). You can't exactly pick up an old Kindle digital file and wonder who left it in a quiet village on the island of Paros. You can't exactly leave an old Kindle digital file on a bookcase for someone else to pick up.

On the bus out of Lefkes I realized I had nothing to read except a book given to me the previous evening by an older Greek writer named Tessos. It was in Greek. A novice can't fake his way through Greek. A novice can't even scan the page in the hopes of picking up the Greek equivalent of 'café' or 'crème fraîche'. I decided to watch the scenery pass. It's at times like this I wished my employer had provided me with a Kindle. So far I have not been given one by [Joe Pickering].

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Londoners by Craig Taylor is published by Granta Books.
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