What sparked On Beauty?

I don't know. I dreamt the plot - but it turned out to be an heavily influenced, Forsterian dream. I don't think of books as having sparks. I start a book when I have the time and the will to do it, and then I keep on writing.

How does that compare with the genesis of your other work?

I can't lay claim to anything as romantic as a genesis. I "start work". I find it very hard to speak about 'my process', as Americans term it. I can speak about the books but not about what comes 'before' the books. I'm not sure anything does.

In the acknowledgements, you say On Beauty is homage to EM Forster, and the novel is patterned around the plot of Howards End. What did you find most inspiring - and most frustrating - about taking the structure of another book and reworking it?

It was in no way as self-conscious or thorough a plan as that - I just had a story in mind about two families who were in collision, and I wanted to make a few nodding, fond references to a writer and book that had a great influence on me when I was a child. I don't set out to frustrate myself when I write - any nods to Forster were pleasurable for me.

It was really an indulgence on my part, I pleased myself - knowing a few people would like it and others wouldn't. All my books so far have required some kind of artificial scaffolding to keep them up; I think novels often do. And then as one becomes more experienced and confident the patterning and frameworks fall away and whatever is left represents the kind of writer you really are.

There are several rather wonderful characters in this novel (I particularly like Zora). Which of them do you feel a particular affection for, and why?

I can't think of my characters that way. I think of my books as collections of sentences and I find I like bits of the writing more than I like other bits, but I'm not such a good magician that I can think of my own characters as autonomous people I might choose between. I feel completely different about other people's fiction - I can think of hundreds of characters written by other people that have had almost as important an intellectual and emotional effect on me as real people I've known.

You've always been very open about the flaws you perceive in your own work... but how do you feel your writing has developed over three novels?

I think it's a strange idea that the moment you begin writing 'creatively' you lose the critical part of your brain. People seem to find it comic or bizarre that a writer might have ambivalent or negative opinions about their own work, but in my experience the main job of writing is over-coming a kind of self-disgust ... Anyway, I've learnt to stop giving my opinion.

For me, writing feels like a life-long apprenticeship, and there's always work to be done. As for development, some things get better, some things deteriorate. That's the nature of the craft, and I think any writer when they're telling the truth - when they're not trying to sell you something - can see the evidence of that in their own work.

What are you working on now?

I'm writing a critical essay - an appreciation - of the American writer David Foster Wallace.

Please could you tell us about what's on your bookshelf? The old stuff, the unread stuff, the favourite books, the passing enthusiasm....

Well ... I have a lot of books. At the moment I'm reading about and around David Foster Wallace, so Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by DFW himself, Sincerity and Authenticity by Lionel Trilling, a collected Borges, Wittgenstein's Tractatus and also the Philosophical Investigations and a book called Some Other Frequency: interviews with innovative American Authors ed. Larry McCaffrey, and The Ethics of Deconstruction by Simon Critchley. Of those I imagine the Tractatus will go completely unread. It will be my fourth attempt to finish the Critchley.

On the shelves in my study, there's a lot of unread Dostoevsky and lots of well-loved Nabokov and Forster and Graham Greene. Passing enthusiasm is all the continental philosophy I bought in college that I haven't touched since. The oldest books are the PG Wodehouse and Dickens and Austen and Alice Walker my parents bought me.

I've got a stack of Hilary Mantel who is a new obsession (to me) and a shelf that's mostly Bloomsbury, Salinger and Delilo. Downstairs there's a proper, canonical alphabetical library, very English in content and not very surprising. I don't read enough foreign or genuinely experimental fiction; I want to change that. I'm presently reading In Persuasion Nation by George Saunders and Noblesse Oblige by Nancy Mitford.

Is there one book by a woman (that isn't eligible for this year's prize) that you'd like to recommend to website visitors?

It's not a very original recommendation, but I think Desperate Characters by Paula Fox is very great.

Why that book?

Because everyone's always agonising over whose is the superior post-war American novel - one of Roth's, or Updike's or Bellow's or Pynchon etc - and beneath all those uneven, unwieldy, masculine 'Great American Novels', there was this slim volume by Ms Fox that is as good as anything her more noisy contemporaries came up with. I think it's a little masterpiece.

Thank you very much.