The Bedside Table Interview: George Ttoouli interrogates novelist A.L. Kennedy

1. What’s on your bedside table at the moment?

There’s a lamp, an alarm clock and a telephone.

2. Any books, and why are you reading them?

My bedside table has three stacks of books at the moment — each stack is about two feet high. Some of it is research — I like to read research before I got to sleep, so then it’ll ooze in. A few things I actually want to read, but I can’t recall what/where they are.

3. Which is your favourite and why?

Oh, Lord … there’s one book on magic and performance and narrative that’s very good, but I can’t really tell you about it — all linked up with the next novel. And it’s not a book that’s available to the public, anyway — limited edition, private press thingy.

4. Any books there you’d rather not be reading? Why so?

Not really. I’d rather not be reading them right now, that’s all.

5. Any books you wish you could be reading right now and why?

Because I’m in the middle of a research run for a novel I’m not reading fiction that much and I do miss it. I can’t even tell you the name of books I have listed to read, I’m so out of touch.

6. Were there any books you read for your latest collection of stories, What Becomes, that you’d recommend?

One of the stories in What Becomes was kicked off, slightly by an incident which is, I think in a book called Dead Men Do Tell Tales — awful title, interesting book by a great forensic anthropologist called William R. Maples. Or it may have been some other book from my forensic shelf. That’s a cracker, anyway.

A bit of it was probably also influenced by a book called The Psychic Mafia by M. Lamar Keene — I read that once I’d got thoroughly annoyed by TV psychics. Beyond that there aren’t really any literary roots to the stories — given that the stories will be literature it seems odd/solipsistic to source them from literature.

7. Is there anything you’d recommend readers to check out before grabbing your Costa Book Prize winner, Day?

Read every book you’ve ever come across about World War II, then go to the British Library and find more, then watch every documentary you can find, then go to airbases and air shows and museums for a couple of years and that might deepen the experience. But it might also be a bit redundant.

8. Are there any books you read after having written one of your novels which you wish you’d read before writing?

That hasn’t happened yet. I have come across material in documentaries and articles about Ancient Egypt that I regret not seeing before I did On Bullfighting.

9. What has excited you in your reading in the past year or so? Did anything stick?

Peace, the new Richard Bausch was good. I have been researching a great deal about how human beings perceive the world intellectually and visually and that’s been very interesting.

And I have been researching voice and the physicality of language a good deal — that’s had a great effect. So I’ve read all of Cicely Berry — I would recommend her to anyone who wants to write. She says that we speak “to save our lives” — that’s something to bear in mind.

10. If you could pretend one of your earlier books was not by you, but actually by an obscure nineteenth century novelist who disappeared into obscurity, which you stumbled across by chance in a charity shop, how would you rewrite it and why?

I’ve never in my life wanted to rewrite an existing book. It’s bad enough rewriting my own. And as I have rewritten my own endlessly before I got rid of them, there’s really no more I could do. Now I could, of course, go back and tweak and shorten and lengthen all the earlier books, because I’m no longer quite who wrote them and my style has moved on and my interests also — but that’s the problem. I’m not the person who wrote them any more, I’m not interested any more and they are things of their time — you can’t turn back time. I’d leave the poor thing in the bookshop and buy something that didn’t seem sickeningly familiar.

It seems that most of my influences are not literary at the moment. Probably most of the time, to be truthful. This does not fit with the university / Eng lit model, but such is life. I do wish I read more fiction and had time to read more recreationally — but I don’t. Next year, maybe. At least I can say I appreciate it when I get it.