You will read over a hundred books in seven months as a Booker Prize judge. How are you approaching this unique challenge, and what are your tips for people who want to find more time for reading but may struggle to fit it around their busy schedules?

There’s only one answer to this, really: make the time. My alarm goes off at 5.45 every morning and after I’ve brushed my teeth and fed the cats (the dog, fortunately, sleeps in) I have an hour and a half before my daughters get up and the gears of the school run begin to grind. That’s a good start, but several more hours need to be found to stay on schedule.  

And time can nearly always be found. The proof of that lies in the fact that I’ve read more than 150 books in seven months and yet still spend too much time doomscrolling on my phone. 

Reading is a mostly solitary experience, but judging is a shared one. How does discussing a book with other people change the reading experience?

Oh it’s transformative. So many of my feelings about books – or any work of art, really – take shape as I talk or write about them. The intimacy of the relationship between a book and its reader is a really beautiful thing, but it can be even better to come out the other side of that immersion and talk to people who’ve been through the same experience. Or, as you nearly always find, have been through a subtly, sometimes even radically, different experience. I think it’s a great way of identifying the richest texts. 

Who, living or dead, would be in your dream book club and why? What would you read and where would you meet?

Because I’m Booker panel-pilled I’m going to have five people in my book club: Virginia Woolf, Borges, Roberto Bolaño, Italo Calvino and Ursula Le Guin. I want them because they’re not only incredible authors, but also great writers of non-fiction about how novels and stories work. I’ll be present but in a strictly snack-serving and eavesdropping capacity. We’ll meet at one of the mid-century modern houses I find myself salivating over in idle moments and the book we – sorry, they – will discuss is whichever one wins the Booker this year.  

What book made you fall in love with reading as a child? How and why did it capture your imagination?

It was Tolkien. My mum kept falling asleep while she was reading me The Hobbit (I was the third child; she was very justifiably done) so I took over and rolled right into The Lord of the Rings. It took me a year, during which time I was rarely if ever seen without the beautifully unwieldy Unwin single-volume edition – now soft with age. I didn’t know at the time that Tolkien constructed entire languages and histories before writing the novels, but as Hemingway explained with his iceberg theory, I think you know when the writer knows something and when they don’t. I could feel the richness behind the lines, even if eight-year-old me was occasionally driven crazy by the lineages and endless geographical details.  

What’s your all-time favourite Booker-nominated book and what’s so special about it? Who would you recommend it to?

This is really hard. Having gone through the entire archive I came up with a top ten, any of which I might choose as my favourite on a certain day. Today I’m going with In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut. It’s an account of three journeys, each of which ends disastrously. The writing is brilliantly tense, very funny at times, and finds the subtlest ways in which to absolutely devastate the reader. It’s formally inventive, too, the narration moving fluidly between third and first-person, and sometimes second. It gives the book the most extraordinary sense of being simultaneously a novel, a memoir, and a mirror we hold up to ourselves as we read.