The Booker Prize 2024 longlistees on the book that inspired them to become a writer

With just a few days to go until the shortlist is announced, we asked some of the authors nominated for this year’s prize to tell us about the book that set them on the path to becoming a writer.

What makes a writer? It’s a million-dollar question. And while there’s rarely a single answer, many authors can point to pivotal moments in their lives that lit a path forward. Often, it’s another writer’s book that serves as the catalyst – a story that opens a door, revealing a vast landscape of fiction beyond.

For some, it was the first time they saw their own world reflected on a page – a moment of recognition that made them realise their experiences and opinions were worth documenting. For others, it was the brilliance of a classic novel, the brutal elegance of its prose, or how it turned their understanding of fiction on its head.

Here, we asked the Booker Prize 2024 nominees about the books that inspired them to put pen to paper. These are the books that made them want to be a writer – and led them to this year’s longlist.

Colin Barrett, author of Wild Houses

I’d wanted to be a writer for a while – though it was always a very abstract notion, essentially a daydream – but when I read Kevin Barry’s first collection of short stories, There Are Little Kingdoms, I discovered a writer writing about a world I recognised, and doing it with vivid abandon and assuredness. It gave me inspiration, permission almost, to write about the world I knew.

Rita Bullwinkel, author of Headshot

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.

Rachel Kushner, author of Creation Lake

Blood Meridian impressed me greatly, when I read it in my late teens. I wanted to be a writer already, but that novel took the brutality of life and the refinement of language and poured them into a hallucinated form. I understood in a new way what the novel could do with the tougher truths of people and history.  I am still an admirer of Cormac McCarthy, but I prefer his early work, and in particular, Child of God, which I studied before composing Creation Lake. The opening is so vivid, and his short chapters move with spring-loaded force.

Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital

This is difficult. I’m going to say Waterland by Graham Swift. I think it’s the strength and quality of Swift’s world-building, his gorgeous, layered storytelling flair and the sheer conviction of that novel that made me itch to write. It made me think, not, ‘I could do that’ but ‘I wonder if I could ever do that?’

I haven’t reread it, I don’t dare. But I’ve since read other books by Swift and my admiration’s undented.

Hisham Matar, author of My Friends

The Catcher in the Rye –  I know, hardly original. But I remember drinking it on a sweltering afternoon in Cairo, lying diagonally in bed beneath a racing ceiling fan when I was 19. I haven’t read it since, but it was for me then a deeply generous and generative book, in that it made me want to write.

Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History

As soon as I realised that stories weren’t like rocks and trees, that people made them up, I knew I wanted to do that with my life. So there’s no single book that made me think ‘this is what I want to do’. But I remember reading Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground in high school – the exhilaration of discovering that you could write about any human experience, about characters who were messy, mad, even loathsome – that the aim is to capture all of what it’s like to be alive. That made fiction, which I already loved so much, seem still more exciting. I still feel that way about Notes from Underground – I teach creative writing, and love that Dostoevsky would likely be pilloried in workshop today, bombarded with advice about how to ameliorate and standardise his narrative… but the novella’s deep strangeness (of form as well as content) is what makes it so powerful.

Anne Michaels, author of Held

I first read Shakespeare’s King Lear when I was 15 and was electrified: its staggering faith in language, everything at stake. The fate of an entire kingdom, dynasties, loyalty, sanity, the afterlife of souls – everything dependent on a single sentence, eleven words – one could argue, a single word – as consequential as the A, C, G, T of our DNA. Set loose by those few words is the shocking confrontation of two irreconcilable systems and a shrieking collision of scale that could only be resolved by madness, revenge, violence, blinding… and imagination, love, hope. And similarly, Lear’s redemption relies on a single sentence of two words. This utter respect for the power of language – in all its duplicity, complexity, failure, redemption – was something I seemed to understand in every atom of me. And each time I re-read King Lear I am gutted again by the unassailable fact that the place of doubt is exactly the place of faith.

Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars

There were a few writers and books that did this for me when I first started reading in my 20s. Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths and Dreamtigers, Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star, and Robert Walsers’ Selected Short Stories. Reading those was the first time I remember thinking, oh, I didn’t know you could do this. I want to do this.

Sarah Perry, author of Enlightenment

When I was a child, Alan Garner made me want to write. But later – when I was old enough to really understand what that meant – it was Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day that fixed my path. When I read it at 17, novels became something to which I wanted to devote my life. Until then I’d mostly read the classics: great literature seemed to me something done by dead women and men. But Ishiguro was alive – it was all happening now, and I wanted to be part of it.

Richard Powers, author of Playground

I suppose that must have been Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I read it the summer after my freshman year in college, when I still thought I would graduate with a degree in physics. That book put me in an altered state of consciousness for weeks. It’s effect on me it was so visceral, making me feel everything from sexual desire to the physical nausea of protracted disease. I never for a minute thought I would ever be able to come anywhere close to reproducing its magic effect. But for the first time in my life, I wanted to try. Shortly afterwards, I changed my college major.

Yael Van Der Wouden, author of The Safekeep

For a long time, my relationship to literature was pretty flat: either I saw myself in a main character, and if I didn’t, I’d re-imagine the narrative in my mind and insert myself within it. The first novel I read that made me see there was so much more to writing than the me/not me dichotomy was Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated. The question of who a story is about is flipped on its head in that novel, and I was endlessly thrilled by it. I’d take it with me to places, quote parts of it out loud at random, and in the true fashion of an obsessed 17-year-old, wrote Foer a letter on my grandfather’s typewriter.

Charlotte Wood, author of Stone Yard Devotional

Most Helen Garner fans begin with Monkey Grip, her first novel, but my own devotion started with her 1985 story collection, Postcards from Surfers. For me, an incipient young writer, reading it was like plunging into a rockpool of fresh, clear water. She showed me that it was possible to write about distinctly local experience, yet have it resonate universally. Her clarity of prose, her humour, her absence of pretension coexisting with serious literary ambition at the sentence level; all of this made me want to try fiction for myself. Those qualities remain when I reread the stories today.  /the booker prize