The Booker Prize 2023 shortlistees on the writers who inspired them

We asked some of the authors shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023 to tell us who has most inspired their writing generally, and their shortlisted works in particular

Paul Harding on Shakespeare’s villains: ‘I want my characters to wrestle with their best and worst impulses’

We asked the authors on the Booker Prize 2023 shortlist to tell us about their inspirations. Here, Paul Harding, author of This Other Eden, explains how the moral complexity of Shakespeare’s villains helped him create Matthew Diamond

Sarah Bernstein on Marie NDiaye: ‘Her characters and settings remain opaque, they keep their secrets’

We asked the authors on the Booker Prize 2023 shortlist to tell us about their inspirations. Here, Sarah Bernstein, author of Study for Obedience, explains how she drew from Marie NDiaye’s pervasive atmosphere of the uncanny

Paul Murray on Thomas Pynchon: ‘His vision of the future feels more prescient every day’

We asked the authors on the Booker Prize 2023 shortlist to tell us about their inspirations. Here, Paul Murray, author of The Bee Sting, writes about Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, a book that’s impossibly gorgeous but hard to keep up with

Paul Lynch on the writers who have influenced him the most

From Faulkner to Melville, Paul Lynch discusses the writers who capture the strangeness of the human condition and the eternal truths that define us