What female writers have inspired and influenced you? Sofía Guerrero

Oh, so many. Of course, I have read Jane Austen in the past but long ago. I don’t know if I’m inspired by her, but I’m maybe interested in her. There’s Toni Morrison, whose Beloved was a great inspiration. The memoir of [Russian poet] Osip Mandelstam’s widow, Nadezhda Mandelstam [Hope Against Hope] – oh God, what a book, just incredible. And recently I read this book called Barracoon, it’s just come out. Zora Neale Hurston was an anthropologist and she transcribed a first-person account of the last slave, who was captured 50 years after slavery was abolished. He has a memory of the whole thing, of how he was kidnapped from his village in Africa – not kidnapped by white people, but by another tribe – and then sold into slavery to American slave traders. So it complicates the way you think about things.

The Sympathizer (The Sympathizer #1) by Viet Thanh Nguyen

"I’m using the metaphor of the family picture but what I’m after is something bigger. The world of books is so infinitely rich, any entry into it is a surprise. My point will become clearer when you look at the image of one of Arundhati Roy’s bookshelves: Malcolm X, Graham Greene, Rudyard Kipling, Gustave Flaubert, Mario Vargas Llosa, Annie Proulx, Jeanette Winterson, Marcel Proust. Such eclecticism! One of the titles on her shelf, Malika Amar Shaikh’s I Want to Destroy Myself, is one that I have been searching for the past three decades ever since I first read about it in V.S. Naipaul’s India: A Million Mutinies Now. If you look carefully, you can see a title by Berger, who was a dear friend of Roy’s, but what that book is surrounded by is all the uncontainable richness of the world, including a red flashlight and a VHS tape of The Battle of Algiers. Both Berger and The Battle of Algiers feature in my novel. In Photocopies, Berger had told the story of the youth of Pakistani radical thinker Eqbal Ahmad. I picked up that narrative thread in my novel and told the story of Ahmad’s adulthood, when he was indicted in 1972 for conspiring to kidnap Kissinger."