How does it feel to be longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022, especially having been shortlisted in 2014? Does it feel different this time?

It feels exactly the same. Completely unexpected, wonderfully thrilling, enormously gratifying, hugely fortunate. The day I heard was just such a great day to be me.

What would winning the Booker mean to you?

This is a future beyond my ability to imagine. I spent a lot of time as an aspiring writer thinking about and learning to survive failure and rejection. I never put the same effort into wondering what success might feel like. Surprise me!

How long did it take to write Booth, and what does your writing process look like? Do you type or write in longhand? Are there multiple drafts or sudden bursts of activity? Is there a significant amount of research and plotting before you begin writing?

Writing Booth took somewhere between 8 to 10 years; I didn’t work continuously so it’s hard to say. But I always read for at least a year before I begin to write, searching for my story, and Booth was no different. I work on the computer; I write in fits and starts. I’ve always wanted a routine, but not enough, apparently, to establish one.

Where do you write? What does your working space look like?

I use a laptop so the story is portable. I’m generally at home, moving chairs as the mood strikes me. There is a sleeping dog on my lap, making the typing awkward. People think I write slowly, but they don’t understand the obstacles I’m working around.

You began your career as a writer of sci-fi - now you’re writing historical fiction. Would you like to see more writers move between genres, and how difficult was it for you to do so? Might you ever return to sci-fi?

Imagining a story set in the past is not entirely different from imagining a story set in the future. One is decent practice for the other. I see a lot of genre-switching these days and I approve. Myself, I never left science fiction, but good sci-fi is really hard to do. I am trying.

You’ve mentioned that when Donald Trump was elected President you abandoned writing a novel and came up with the idea for Booth instead. What made you alight on the story of John Wilkes Booth and what are the parallels with modern America?

This is not exactly right. I was working on Booth when Trump was elected so the novel I abandoned was the same one I returned to. But my focus changed. Initially, I was thinking about guns, about the families of shooters. When I returned, I was much more focused on the Civil War, all the ways in which it never ended.

Like the UK, America - and much of the world - is in a turbulent, challenging and sometimes frightening period. Will we see more fiction responding to that and how might it change the creative landscape?

My parents lived through the Great Depression, World War Two and McCarthyism. I wish they were here to provide calibration, because things do seem unprecedently dire. Bookstores tell me there are periods when the reading public wants to deal seriously with the world and periods when all they want is escape. I can’t guess which is coming next. But if anyone can write us out of these calamities, please do so.