What is your favourite music?

Solo piano, cello, or guitar in almost any genre, form, or style. Renaissance polyphony. Irish music. Beethoven’s late string quartets. Early Bruce Springsteen. Ah tutti contenti from The Marriage of Figaro. Martha Wainwright singing Dis, quand reviendras-tu. Ask me next week.

Which human quality do you most admire?

Generosity.

What is your favourite book?

My Desert Island books are Middlemarch, A Passage to India, A.S. Byatt’s The Virgin in the Garden, Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond saga, and Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore.

Who is your favourite author?

There’s no single favourite. I like individual works rather than individual authors.

And your favourite literary hero and heroine?

Dunnett’s Francis Crawford of Lymond and Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, because they’re both so funny. Most of the heroines in serious literary fiction are a bit of a pain; Dorothea in Middlemarch needs a good smack, and so do both of the Catherines in Wuthering Heights.

How old were you when your first book appeared?

The first book I edited, thirty; the first book I wrote, thirty-six.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Not much. I once wrote a book review on my iPhone while sitting on a hard chair in a hospital corridor.

How do you regard publishers?

I think publishers have a hard row to hoe. There are certain practices in publishing that I don’t like, but by and large the publishers I know are smart, imaginative, honourable people who are genuinely passionate about books and writing.

What do you think of the state of criticism?

I think there will always be good cultural critics, no matter what the medium or the rate of pay.

If you had your time over again, would you choose to be a writer?

There are too many variables there to give a meaningful answer. I don’t think much about ‘being a writer’ as such – I’m more interested in doing the work than I am in having the label.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

I love them, although they have become a bit samey and I have become very picky about which sessions I attend. Adelaide Writers’ Week was the first literary festival in Australia by a long way, so as an Adelaide girl I grew up thinking they were a normal part of life.

Do you feel artists are valued in our society?

Not by everyone, and not as much as they used to be. We are living in a neo-liberal world where making a profit as the main motive for doing anything is taken for granted, and where even universities and hospitals are run as businesses. Artists are not going to do well in that environment.

What are you working on now?

Writing four short book reviews, preparing to run an all-day workshop on writing about place, reading for a review essay on three recent feminist publications, making notes towards an article about recipe scrapbooks for an online foodie publication, marking a small pile of writing assignments, thinking about an upcoming short presentation on a single poem, convening two different judging panels for literary prizes, and working on some ideas for a commissioned piece on the changing Adelaide landscape.