The 2025 longlistees on the book that inspired them to become a writer

For many authors, there’s a single book they can point to that made them the writer they are today. For some, it was one of the greats – the raw beauty of its prose, the sheer brilliance of a work that reshaped their entire understanding of storytelling. For others, it was a novel that mirrored their own world in such a way that it made them realise there was a place for their voice.  

Each of this year’s longlisted authors found inspiration in different places, but all share a defining moment, when the desire to write took hold. Here, we asked the authors nominated for the International Booker Prize 2025 about the books that shaped them – and set them on the path to this year’s longlist. 

Saou Ichikawa, author of Hunchback 

I started out my career as an author writing romance novels for young people, and those early attempts were all imitations of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. While I was writing romance, all of my heroines end up as Nastasya. I don’t write romances any more, and I’m constantly surrounded by other kinds of books that I have to read, but in my old age, I hope to go back to The Idiot again, and to enjoy it, leisurely, as a romance novel. 

Christian Kracht, author of Eurotrash 

That one book would be Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. There was this electric shock that zapped me as a young reader: Oh. Now I understand. This is what fiction can do. I remember very well closing Le Guin’s book and feeling empty and devastated that it was over, and yearning to physically go and live in those immense beautiful worlds that she created. 

Dahlia de la Cerda, author of Reservoir Bitches 

The book that made me think, this is what I want to do, I could write like this, was El vampiro de la colonia Roma [written by Luis Zapata Quiroz], specifically because of the way it handles language. I come from a working-class, barrio background, and the language used in this book is the same popular speech spoken in Mexican neighbourhoods.  

Seeing it in a book meant that the way I spoke was valid, that there was nothing shameful about my way of expressing myself, that there was linguistic richness in it, and that there was literary beauty there, too. From that moment on, I thought, I want to write like this, I want to capture the linguistic richness found on the streets of Mexico.  

Vincent Delecroix, author of Small Boat 

Two books, very different:  

The first one was Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: I had never seen such a freedom in writing and invention, as the author gave the impression of being able to do anything and transgress every convention of the novel. It revealed to me a huge domain of literary possibilities.  

The second was Thomas Bernhard’s Extinction, and then all other books by Thomas Bernhard. Long, violent, shocking monologues; delirious and desperate ways of speaking and telling; a very deep and dark conception of life; social criticism and bitter irony; and, each time, a singular voice and its variations – which is for me one of the most important features of my own writing.  I have never felt more affinity with an author.  

Solvej Balle, author of On the Calculation of Volume I 

Probably Michel Tournier’s Friday (Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique). I had been reading a lot of books about people on uninhabited islands, and after I had written a paper about ‘robinsonades’ in high school, my teacher handed me Tournier’s book, which had just been translated into Danish. I think what I liked about it was how much thinking there was in it – but I think it was very male-centered. I might still think that, but I haven’t re-read it.  

Astrid Roemer, author of On a Woman’s Madness

I always have wondered what people were saying and talking about and how they find words. Reading dictionaries and ‘decomposing’ words became a hobby. I never knew writers existed, but I fell in love with written words and books even before my teens.   

Mircea Cărtărescu, author of Solenoid 

I never wanted to be a writer. In fact, I never wanted to be anything. Writing for me is like breathing: I’m not aware of it, but without it I suffocate. I never wanted to write, just as I never wanted to live or speak. It just happened that way: I wrote, with all my might, every sentence and every paragraph, every novel and every poem. I didn’t write books to publish them, but to live in them. However, when I was 14, I read Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote and had a kind of reverie about what it means to be a writer: a man alone living in a studio apartment with only his typewriter.  

Anne Serre, author of A Leopard-Skin Hat

Paludes, by André Gide. I read it when I was 16. It was a book quite unlike any I had read. First of all because of its subject matter: the narrator tells you he’s a writer and that he’s writing Paludes. The book I was reading, in other words… And then there was a tone I had never come across before: wry and self-assured, but at the same time ingenious. There was something brazen and slightly crazy about it that really appealed to me. I remember saying to myself: ‘Ah-ha, so one can also write that way!’  

Gaëlle Bélem, author of There’s a Monster Behind the Door 

It was more an author: Victor Hugo. Before each book of mine is published, I return to the house where he lived from 1832 to 1848. Like with Dante, Goethe or Shakespeare, Hugo’s house in Paris has been turned into a museum. It’s like a pilgrimage for me, because my gratitude to this author is infinite. Hugo wrote everything – poems, plays, novels, pamphlets, short stories. He is the incarnation of the national writer, and I have made him my spiritual father. A girl doesn’t normally try to do better than her father. She just wants to walk hand in hand with him and be nourished by his experience. A short story like ‘Claude Gueux’, which is a magnificent condemnation of the death penalty, moved me profoundly. The same goes for The Last Day of a Condemned Man. I often reread Contemplations and The Legend of The Ages, which contain respectively ‘Tomorrow at Dawn’ and ‘The Conscience’, two of my favourite poems. Without Les Misérables I would not have written my first novel. There is something of Gavroche in my little Dessaintes.  

Today, like yesterday, I have no problem with the incredible difference separating me from Victor Hugo. I simply believe that the fact of idolising such a genius has motivated me and placed the bar very high.  

Hiromi Kawakami, author of Under the Eye of the Big Bird

It was the short story ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ by Gabriel García Márquez, which I read when I was in university. I thought, ‘This is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been wanting to write!’ But a little while later, I read One Hundred Years of Solitude and became discouraged. I thought to myself, ‘I could never write that’.

Having lived a little longer now, I’ve fortunately come to feel that, although of course I’ll never write something like García Márquez, I might be able to write something else, which takes a different form.