Personally, I find that there is no substitute for going to a place if you want to write about it. The word ‘author’ is quite close to the word ‘authenticity’ – and the more you know a place, the more time you can spend there, the more authentic your writing will become. Or at least that’s my experience. Other writers write well from maps and the imagination and so on. But I found that going to Russia for my second novel and going to the Amazon for this last one, really helped. And, well, it seems to me fairly obvious that more things will occur to you if you go: the story will flourish when it is more familiar with its setting. Plus … what’s not to like about traveling to write?!

No, I was lucky – I travelled up to Yorkshire to see someone who was a professional calligrapher – he ran the Society of Scribes and Illuminators – and he taught me everything I needed to know. Afterwards, I was able to call him and ask him further details. Then I went back to check everything with him – when that novel was in final draft. It was a fascinating experience. I later found out that the SSi had fallen out with some other society of calligraphers and that there were schisms and tensions and splits. It reminded me of the python scene where John Clease shouts ‘splitters’. But, of course, in finding out about all this, I did start to have a different relationship with letters – a bit like Jasper in the novel does…

Yes, these days, I go to the artist’s enclave at the Hay Festival and do these Q and A’s whereas before I would tended not to get in and there would be security and fighting and tears and I’d often get thrown out and then when I used to tunnel back in they’d get mad and I’d be arrested and have to wrest control of the steering wheel in the police van and knock out the police officers and steal their uniforms and come back in by pretending to be security – it was exhausting and pretty dangerous at times.

I see myself as an eager but embarrassingly substandard pupil on a creative writing course run by Tolstoy and Jane Austen. Tolstoy doesn’t come into the classes much but when he does he is usually much too depressed about the general poverty of the work. Austen is too polite to say anything. …
I love too many writers to list here. But … Philip Roth for sheer visceral energy. Zola for character. Coetzee for the human animal. Nabokov for style. Pat Barker for fearlessness. Martin Amis for his sentences. Donne for wit. Scott Fitzgerald for stylishness. Yeats for poetry. Bulgakov for hilarious outrage. Franzen, Hollinghurst and Alice Munro for how to do it in a contemporary context. Steinbeck for compassion. A page or two of the Marquis de Sade to banish the sanctimonious. Dickens and Dostoyevsky for all the above and everything else. Ishiguru. Hilary Mantel. Gogol. Heinrich Boll. Julian Barnes. Anyone good, really. There’s always something to learn. Conrad, though, not really. I may be alone in the world in finding Heart of Darkness over-rated. I read it a long time ago, mind you – so perhaps I was too young. Right now, I’m reading the new Holinghurst. He is a master.

I can’t name them because of a super-injunction.