‘Imperfect! That imperfection was such a relief: to see that a book could be flawed and still brilliant; that those flaws might be part of what makes the book live.’

‘Her body of work shows she was a writer who didn’t take any ‘safe’ options. Astley followed her instincts. She constantly pushed herself to write in new ways and in new voices, and she tackled themes others weren’t willing to.’

‘The writing is utterly without self-pity or sentimentality, both of which I abhor in fiction, and despite the horror of Denisovich’s life and its factual basis in Solzhenitsyn’s, I find it the most cheering book in my library.’

‘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.’