Q&As with the 2021 nominated authors

‘I’ve just updated the fable for the age of pandemics, exoplanets, and mass extinction’

‘I’m sadly incapable of planning my books. I just have to leap and then hope I’m able to resolve all the problems.’

‘I view each book I write as a kind of apprenticeship to writers I want to emulate’

‘The internet - in the form of social media, at least - is much more like fiction than it is anything else.’ 

‘I knew I wanted to make the line between fact and fiction imperceptible’

‘In film, the point-of-view jumps and changes all the time - why not in a novel?’

‘In 2005 I was a cynical veteran, battling through my fourth Man Booker shortlisting – and still completely thrilled to be at the ceremony.’

‘The years of frustration and rejection slips taught me that the only sensible reason to write is because you love writing’

‘I wanted to do justice to the characters I had in my head’

‘I liked the idea of the book being somehow spoken, as to a friend’

‘I wanted to write something that tried to do justice to the ordinary strangeness of our lives in time’