Chris Womersley

So it's always this sort of process, same with literary, seeing what came before, I guess.

I mean, I do reread them even, you know, things like Wuthering Heights I'll pick up and read a couple of chapters of when I'm at a loose end, for example.

I'll pick up a bit of Eliot and read some Eliot.

So it's all still kind of bubbling around in there, I guess.

Look, I've had various crushes on authors over the years.

I had a big, massive crush on Marguerite Duras for a long time and could quote the entire sort of opening paragraph of The Lover for quite a number of years.

Can you still do it?

One day I was already old.

In the entrance to a public place, a man came up to me and said, people say you used to be beautiful, but I prefer your face as it is now ravaged or something like that.

It is.

It's an incredible, incredible book, very slim novel about sort of her relationship with an older man in Indochina back in the 30s, I think.

And I had a big crush on Michael Ondaatje for a long time.

Oh, me too.

Yeah, the English patient I read kind of like, you know, sort of almost obsessively in the mid-90s, I suppose.

And most recently, weirdly, I had a big crush on Philip Roth.

I was a bit late to the Philip Roth party.

He's never going to be the kind of book I would ever write, in a sense.

Like he's just sort of, I mean, for a start, he's just kind of way out of my league.

And secondly, it's just a completely different kind of register, I suppose, to anything I would write.

So what do you love about him then?