‘I read the five books in The Dark is Rising sequence one after another, that week of my thirteenth birthday, and they have haunted me ever since. Vivid and compelling, filled with brooding atmosphere and a strong sense of danger, the books are steeped in myth, mystery, and magic.’

‘There’s a heartbreaking grace that shines through in fragments, and while it’s most frequently felt by White’s outsider characters, none are exempt from their own unbearable moments of longing, striving and desire.’

‘Mr Ondaatje’s bewitching tome has been like my tuning fork over the years — very different, of course, to my own writing — but Coming Through Slaughter sets the bar in terms of daring and risk-taking. All I need is a paragraph from its deliciously audacious pages to get me in the mood and I’m off and racing.’

‘It was Hemingway, in particular, who mastered, in prose form, the playwright’s technique of ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’. Both he and Chekhov wanted readers to bring to the story what an actor would offer when performing a play: engagement, interpretation, a process that invites the reader, like the thespian, to become a collaborator in the making of meaning.’

‘Smith is generous, not just to characters but to readers… She doesn’t separate high and low culture, because they’re all a part of one world in which she’s engaged, one where everyone is constantly straddling different race, class and education backgrounds.’

‘Garner’s sensibility remains an anchor beneath me as an Australian woman writer, just as Hulme is a rock of Indigenous thought that I rest against weekly.’

‘Reading Janet Frame is to enter a world of animated detail. No person, place or thing is ordinary; all is worked into a web of significance. This way of imagining the world can be equally revelatory and dangerous.’

‘When we are in love our feelings seem as if they have been raised to the highest power, and we instinctively reach for a mode of expression to match the ardour of love’s dazzling, yet often cruel, grip and sting.’