The inspirations behind my Booker-longlisted book  

I wrote this book l because I wanted to remember how I felt when I was a young woman and obsessively competed in every sport I could find. I would often drive, or have my parents drive me, to tournaments that felt very similar to the tournament in this book. My hope is that boxers, and lovers of boxing, will find authenticity in this book, but that also anyone who has ever been gripped by an obsessive drive to accomplish something, and to be seen at a time when they felt otherwise invisible, will find themselves in these pages. 

The book that made me fall in love with reading  

In the third grade I read over one hundred Nancy Drew novels – every Nancy Drew novel that had, at that time, been published. When I finished the series I was under the impression that there were no more books to read. Thank goodness there were.  

The book that made me want to become a writer  

In college I took ‘Introduction to Writing Fiction’ as an elective. The course was taught by Joanna Howard, and it contained, on its syllabus, many books that moved me more deeply than I had ever previously been moved. It was the first time anyone had given me contemporary literature. I spent the following summer using Howard’s syllabus as a map, reading everything written by every author that had been assigned. The syllabus had mostly novels, but there was one anthology, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, edited by Ben Marcus, which I still love. 

The book I return to time and time again  

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Every time I read that book it shapeshifts. Passages I once thought were central often, upon rereading, fall away, and new passages take centre stage, as if the book is more tide pool than language. 

The book I can’t get out of my head  

Kingdom Cons by Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa Dillman which is simultaneously a book that manages to exist very specifically in time, in drug cartel-ruled rural Mexico, but also outside of time, in an archetypal kingdom, with an archetypal king. 

The book that changed the way I think about the world  

Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn, which is told from the point of view of a collective future super-computer trying to recall the life of a graphic novelist whose brother has just committed suicide, is one of the strangest and most beautiful books I have ever read. It changed the way I understand grief, anger, sex, love and death. 

The book that changed the way I think about the novel  

Renee Gladman’s entire series of fictional works set in the imaginary city-state of Ravicka: Event Factory, The Ravickians, Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, and Houses of Ravicka. The world-building in these novels, and their premise that architecture could be a language, is mind-bending and wholly seductive. 

The book that impressed me the most  

Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan, which is a novel built from Scanlan’s oral interviews with a life-long racehorse trainer, is so propulsive, so wholly other and mysterious, that when I finished it I knew only that it was alchemy. 

The book I’m reading at the moment  

Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett. I have just begun, but am already completely committed.  

The Booker-nominated book everyone should read  

The Sellout by Paul Beatty. Reading it felt like watching history in reverse, and then fast forward, one curdled, brilliantly refracted bit at a time.