Where are you happiest?

Walking along a beach or dirt road near where I live on the Mornington Peninsula.

What is your favourite music?

When not preferring silence, I like to listen to Leonard Cohen and Emmylou Harris, but a friend recently introduced me to the early music ensemble, Accordone (Marco Beasley and Guido Morini).

What is your favourite book?

Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, for its style, vivid sense of place, and blighted characters.

And your favourite author?

Cormac McCarthy.

And your favourite literary hero and heroine?

I like to write and read about characters who stand obliquely in relation to those around them, so I’ll nominate Jane Gardam’s eponymous Old Filth and the bereaved Mary in Alice Thomas Ellis’s The Birds of the Air.

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.

I greatly enjoyed Kingsley Amis when I was younger, but now find him windy and narrow.

How old were you when your first book appeared?

Thirty.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Colette said, ‘Look long and hard at the things that please you, even longer and harder at what causes you pain.’ Sometimes I don’t look long or hard enough, and start too soon.

How do you regard publishers?

I’ve been well served by mine, but would rather be in the hands of my smallish independent than a global colossus.

What do you think of the state of criticism?

I’m dismayed that review space is shrinking in Australia and that there are few outlets for the longer essay review.

If you had your time over again, would you choose to be a writer?

Simenon said, ‘I’d like to carve my novel in a piece of wood.’ I like the idea of being able to take a step back from a painting or sculpture in order to identify the infelicities.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

Really, they are readers’ festivals and a necessary evil for writers, but the smaller regional festivals do offer more scope for meeting readers and other writers, unlike large metropolitan festivals.

Do you feel artists are valued in our society?

If only we could say, with a straight face, that an artist had ‘brought the game into disrepute’.

What are you working on now?

Thinking long and hard for a novel about a child’s view of Russia and communism in the 1950s.