Deborah Levy, novelist, playwright & poet: "Zoe Pilger might be the heiress to Angela Carter"
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Your support makes all the difference.Where are you now and what can you see?
In a North London pub with a friend. It's raining and our coats are spread over the radiator. I can see the young woman working at the bar has had a new nose piercing. Very nice.
What are you currently reading?
Zoe Pilger's Eat My Heart Out. It's made me think that Pilger might be the heiress to Angela Carter.
Choose a favourite author and say why you admire her/him
J.G. Ballard – for the ideas that crowd every page –he reckons the personality type who will best survive the corporate 21st century is the psychopath. I see the truth of this every day and have no idea why I should be upset when leading supermarkets suffer "a shock fall in profits".
Describe the room where you usually write
I hire a modest garden shed built under an apple tree. On the wall hangs a microscopic photograph of Charlotte Bronte's quill pen – an artwork by genius Cornelia Parker. Last winter when I was re-writing An Amorous Discourse in The Suburbs of Hell, I was snowed in twice and had to dig myself out.
Which fictional character most resembles you?
Some of the characters in my fictions have a little bit of me in them. I guess that's a sort of literary DNA?
Who is your hero/heroine from outside literature?
Sigmund Freud. Apparently he disliked chicken and said to his family, "Let the chickens live and lay eggs." That's a marvellous thought and could change the course of 21st century industrial farming.
Deborah Levy's book-length poem, 'An Amorous Discourse in The Suburbs of Hell', is published by And Other Stories (£7.99)
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