Joseph Conrad, John Berger, Tarjei Vesaas, the list could go on and vary from day to day.
2.Who has had a major influence on your writing?
Those named above, Anne Michaels, Michael Ondaatje, many more.
3.Can you name at least one book that you never finished?
That I remember, Ulysses—most unfinished books are swiftly forgotten.
4.What word or words do you always have trouble spelling?
My cousin married a man named Colacicchi.
5.What three adjectives best describe you?
Today: vague, distracted, and half-asleep.
6.Which of your characters would you most like to be and why?
The boy Thomas Goodlard, who is narrator of my novel The Solitude of Thomas Cave. He has adventures and sees the Arctic but comes home and builds a good life on land.
7.Which author would you invite to dinner?
Penelope Fitzgerald.
8.Where do you write?
Ideally, in my study, which is a bare cell in the sixteenth-century part of my house.
9.When do you write?
Early morning.
10.What makes you happy?
With my family: harvest on our farm. Alone: a Transylvanian meadow.
11.What do you most fear?
Not being able to get out of a crowd or possibly a department store.
12.What is your favorite vice?
Boxed-set TV thriller series.
13.What is the quality you most like in yourself?
That I’m still open to adventure.
14.What are the qualities you most like in your friends?
Sincerity, humor, imagination.
15.Would you be lying if you said your works were not autobiographical?
One of my novels is. The others are, truthfully, not at all.
16.What part of your personality do you detest?
Self-consciousness.
17.What is your favorite adjective?
White.
18.What is your favorite book?
Whichever was the last great book I read through which I’m seeing the world. Right now, An Angel at My Table, by Janet Frame.
19.What book would you read three times?
Middlemarch.
20.To whom would you award the Nobel Prize for Literature and why?
John Berger—for the thoughtfulness, universality, and humanity of his work, which has deepened with age.
