Writers

Also a widely published journalist, Lionel Shriver is the author of ten novels, including the New York Times bestsellers So Much for That (a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award and the Wellcome Trust Book Prize) and The Post-Birthday World (Entertainment Weekly’s 2007 Book of the Year).

Zoe Lambert is a Manchester based writer. She has an MA in Creative Writing at UEA and a PhD from Manchester Metropolitan University. She lectures on the creative writing MA at the Universities of Bolton and Edge Hill.

A.K. Benedict read English at Cambridge and Creative Writing at the University of Sussex. She lives in Hastings and writes in a room filled with teapots and the severed head of a ventriloquist’s dummy. She did have a blow-up pirate but punctured it.

It’s really difficult to select only three books that have inspired my work, if inspired is the right word. I have many books and authors I love and admire but I don’t know that they have actually inspired what I write unless subconsciously.

Three of my favourite books are Orwell’s Coming Up for Air, Nabokov’s Lolita and Richard Yates’ short story collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.

AS Byatt is renowned internationally for her novels and short stories. Her novels include the Booker Prize-Winning Possession and The Children’s Book. Her most recent book is Ragnorak: The End of the Gods, a retelling of the Norse myth.

Will Cohu was born in Yorkshire in 1964. Educated at Exeter College, Oxford, from 1992 he freelanced as writer, editor and journalist, mostly for the Daily Telegraph. His stories Nothing But Grass, and East Coast-West Coast, were both short-listed for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Award.

My most recent reading recommendations are Louise Glück – Meadowlands, Michael Deforge – Very Casual, and Jane Bowles – Two Serious Ladies.

I seem to have a real penchant for female North American writers – Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Anne Tyler, Annie Proulx, Lorrie Moore – I love the detail and the vivacity of their writing, and their ability to load ‘small’ things with huge political and emotional weight.

The books that have inspired me are many and varied. I think a lot of the inspiring happens when you’re little, and not looking for it yet. When I was little I was given a book by the poet Edna St Vincent Millay, and loved it – for her joie de vivre, her openness to experience, and what I now know is her technical skill. Her poems are often like little stories, and I love that.

Books That Have Inspired Me:

• Vanity Fair – William Thackeray.
  A vast, satirical take on life in the Napoleonic era, yet you’ll see the characters alive and well in any lifestyle magazine today.

Books That Have Inspired Me:

• The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
• The Daylight and the Dust by Janet Frame
• In The Chinks of the World Machine – on Feminism and Science Fiction by Sarah LeFanu