WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE FILM?

I don't have one. Not many stay with me past the moment. The last one that did was Andrey Zvyagintsev's Elena (2011).

AND YOUR FAVOURITE BOOK?

What an impossible question! For me, the joy of reading is the constellation that forms, made entirely of books, setting my course, changing my direction, keeping me alive.

NAME THE THREE PEOPLE YOU WOULD MOST LIKE TO DINE WITH.

I wouldn't mind being a fly on the wall when Ta-Nehisi Coates has dinner with James Baldwin and Chinua Achebe – and, as long as I'm out of range, up on the ceiling when Rudyard Kipling joins them.

WHICH WORD DO YOU MOST DISLIKE, AND WHICH WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE BACK IN PUBLIC USAGE?

Exit as a verb. Gourmet as an adjective. Is anything not gourmet these days? To revive: dastard, and dastardly, as in dishonourable or despicable. There would be plenty of occasions for its use.

WHO IS YOUR FAVOURITE AUTHOR?

Ditto for the books answer. Well there's Virginia Woolf, but I always say her. Right now I am reading Jenny Erpenbeck, and I don't know how I managed not to find Visitation when it was first translated in 2010.

AND YOUR FAVOURITE LITERARY HERO OR HEROINE?

What's all this with favourites? How about Nathan Zuckerman?

NAME AN EARLY LITERARY IDOL OR INFLUENCE WHOM YOU NO LONGER ADMIRE – OR VICE VERSA.

Christa Wolf; Andreï Makine.

WHAT, IF ANYTHING, IMPEDES YOUR WRITING?

Too much noise.

HOW DO YOU REGARD PUBLISHERS?

Well, on the whole, at least at an individual level. They face difficult conditions, as do writers.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE STATE OF CRITICISM?

The London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books are essential ingredients in my constellation of reading.

IF YOU HAD YOUR TIME OVER AGAIN, WOULD YOU CHOOSE TO BE A WRITER?

Probably. Or a stage designer – if I wasn't a dunce at anything that requires measurements and drawings of any sort, let alone to scale.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF WRITERS' FESTIVALS?

When they are well curated, I am grateful for the combinations and variety of writers they invite. At their best, when dialogue is real, when you hear a writer you hadn't known of, usually from somewhere beyond the Anglosphere, I'm glad to be there. But when the stage becomes a theatre of ego, forget it.

DO YOU FEEL ARTISTS ARE VALUED IN OUR SOCIETY?

The numbers who attend writers' festivals and exhibitions at our major galleries make me feel that, yes, there is interest in art, and writing, and debate. But when the Australia Council is cut and cut again, and funding withdrawn from the smaller, quirkier theatre groups and galleries, and when there's less and less money for individual grants, what other conclusion can there be than that art, in its fullest sense, is not much valued in our dastardly world of money.

WHAT ARE YOU WORKING ON NOW?

I've learned the hard way it's best to keep quiet on that one.