Ruth Ozeki, the US author, film-maker, and Zen Buddhist priest, won the 2022 Women's prize for fiction for The Book of Form and Emptiness. In an interview, she reflects on the books that have shaped her life and writing.
Earliest Reading Memory
Ozeki recalls 'reading' Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd at around three or four years old, though she admits it was mostly about the pictures.
Favorite Book Growing Up
Her favorite book as a child was Charlotte's Web by EB White. She initially remembered it as a story about a girl named Fern saving her pig, Wilbur, but later realized it is actually about a spider named Charlotte who uses words to save Wilbur. 'It's about the power of language to save lives,' Ozeki says. She sees all her own books as attempts to recreate Charlotte's Web.
Teenage Reading
As a teenager, Ozeki read voraciously. The Catcher in the Rye taught her a disaffected attitude and how to spot a phoney, skills crucial for adolescent survival.
Writer Who Changed Her Mind
Ozeki credits One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, which she read while trekking in Nepal in 1975. The experience introduced her to magic realism before she knew the term.
Book That Made Her Want to Be a Writer
She was inspired by books about smart little girls who were writers, such as Harriet the Spy, Little Women, and Jane Eyre. She argues that any story told in the first person by a misfit female narrator is about being a writer.
Author She Came Back To
Ozeki prefers not to revisit Kurt Vonnegut, whose humor taught her about irony versus cynicism and earnest irreverence. She fears his books might not hold up, so she keeps his tone alive in her mind.
Authors She Rereads
She regularly rereads poets like Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, and Elizabeth Bishop. She bought Geography III after reading Bishop's poem 'One Art' in 1976, which is about loss and survival.
Book She Could Never Read Again
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig inspired her as a teenager, but as an adult she found the narrator's pomposity irritating, mirroring her own teenage pomposity.
Book Discovered Later in Life
Ozeki discovered a 13-volume set of Tales of Chekhov translated by Constance Garnett. She started reading short stories when teaching a fiction-writing class and is still working through the 201 stories.
Currently Reading
She is reading Sublimation by Isabel J Kim, a debut novel about an immigrant story where characters split into two selves at border crossing. She also enjoys The Typewriter Revolution: A Typist's Companion for the 21st Century.
Comfort Read
Ozeki finds comfort in Lydia Davis's Collected Stories, appreciating the brevity and precision of her sentences.
Ozeki's book The Typing Lady is published by Canongate.
