What is your favourite word?

Blagodaren.

Which human quality do you most admire?

Generosity – more specifically, charity.

Where would you like to have been born?

On the moon (in a moon base)

What is your favourite book?

If you put me on the spot, I might say Sir Thomas Urquhart’s The Jewel or Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds or Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch.

And your favourite literary hero and heroine?

That’s even tougher. Don Quixote, I suppose; and Myrna Minkoff.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Publishing other people, and the odd bout of self-doubt.

How old were you when your first book appeared?

Thirty-eight. I’m slow to publish. All my books published so far were largely written a long time ago: Glissando in 1998, Grotesque Anatomies between 1992 and 1997, On Reflection between 1992 and 1996. There’s a backlog.

Of which of your books are you fondest?

Glissando.

In a phrase, how would you characterise your work?

By turns melancholy and exuberant, shot through with a deep curiosity about the world.

Who is your favourite author?

If forced to answer, I would nominate Paul Muldoon among poets and Patrick White or Saul Bellow among novelists.

How do you regard publishers?

With suspicion (being one myself). I’m deeply disappointed with some of the decisions mainstream publishing has made over the last fifteen years. I understand commercial necessity, but dropping poetry lists and churning out forests’ worth of mediocre novels do not help to sustain a vigorous literary culture in this country. But I do think independent literary publishing is very exciting at the moment.

What do you think of the state of criticism?

Middling. A lot of what purports to be evaluative often seems to me merely descriptive. Good criticism is probably as hard to come by as really good writing. Bring back Pure Criticism, as Basil Pilbeam would say.

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

I don’t think there was ever a choice involved, although I probably would have been happier as a carpenter or a cook.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

A necessary evil

Do you feel artists are valued in our society?

Yes and no: painters, some novelists, opera singers do all right – especially if they like the media – but poets seem to be regarded as escapees from a sheltered workshop.

What are you working on now?

A novel about someone who collects obituaries, a long poem about an architect, a new collection of poems, and working out what to do with all the other stuff lying in the bottom drawer.