The other two judges wanted Philip Roth to win for The Human Stain but I persuaded them to give it to Michael Ondaatje for Anil’s Ghost. In 2001 I was a judge for a prize and we shortlisted The Name of the World by Denis Johnson. Berger’s influence was so strong it actually took me a while, along with multiple transfusions and organ transplants from other writers, to become myself. John Berger, without a doubt, but I can’t narrow it down to a single book since the influence was, precisely, his range and endless formal innovation. The book that had the greatest influence on my writing Naturally, I often find myself wishing that one of my poxy books had sold as many copies as an even poxier one by someone else but, as Walt Whitman put it: “I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.” Impossible to answer honestly except by saying “None”. It reminds me of that Play for Today from about the same time, Shakespeare or Bust. The nice thing about this story is that my mum and her friend weren’t teachers at the school they both worked in the canteen as dinner ladies. I still know huge chunks of the play off by heart. She lent it to me and that, combined with the lessons by a wonderful teacher at grammar school, led to my becoming swallowed up in the currents and eddies of language. A woman my mum worked with at my old junior school liked Shakespeare and had an LP of an edited version of the play with one of those Hammer horror actors, Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee (I forget which), as Richard. Quite something, to be freshly overwhelmed by the greatness of a book you’ve read twice before: every page, every paragraph, every sentence.Ī play in the form of a book in the form of a record, to be precise: Shakespeare’s Richard III. Just finished Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus for the third time.

Lonesome dove novel