‘I will often tell students that you must work hard to become better at poetry, and I believe it, but a part of me thinks that a true poet is born with a certain pair of eyes…that take in the small and the large simultaneously, eyes that can see through walls of brick, skin and history, to the pained and pain-inflicting heart of things.’

‘Caryl Churchill is one writer who never fails me. Everything she’s produced — from her earliest plays to the present day — is not only a bold adventure into the unknown, it extends the possibilities of what theatre can do.’

‘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.’

‘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.’