Tell us about your new novel, Long Wave.Long Wave is a novel about trying and failing and trying and failing and trying and failing to find connection. It is about parenting, community, family and hares. You became the youngest writer shortlisted for the Booker Prize for your debut novel Everything Under. Tell us about the book and the whole experience.Everything Under is a retelling set on a very murky canal where there might, or might not, be a creature hidden beneath the water. It is a novel about language, grief, fate. It was a tremendous experience to be shortlisted in that way, not knowing it was a possibility. It gave me the opportunity to keep writing. It is partly rooted in Greek myths. Are they a big influence? I grew up with that beautifully illustrated D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths for children. It was very formative in my love and understanding of stories and the possibility of magic and strangeness. Mothers and daughters seem to be a recurring theme, as in Sisters, your second novel. Tell us about Sisters and why that theme might recur.Sisters is a haunted-house novel about two sisters named September and July, who are forced to leave their home and move to a tiny cottage with their grief-filled mother. I like writing about the entanglements of family, the bonds that hold us together even when we should part. It is a novel inspired by Shirley Jackson and Toni Morrison. There might be a nod to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse in Sisters. Her idea of characters having caves interests you?I love Virginia Woolf. She wrote about digging beautiful caves out from behind her characters and this is always in my mind when I write, an act which so often feels like digging. Your debut short story collection Fen won the Edge Hill Prize in 2017. Did it have an over-arching theme?Fen is an interlinked short story collection set in that dark, flat land, the English Fens. They are uncanny stories about women and girls and the land. The Fens and desolate countryside are a common setting for your work. How important is location in your fiction?It is vital. So often if something is not working in a draft it is because the location is either wrong or not securely set in my mind. The setting is not simply a place within which the characters move, it is a character in itself and very tangled up in the themes and issues of the book. What are the different challenges and rewards of short- and long-form fiction?Long fiction is a marathon and stamina is important. Holding something that big and unwieldy in your head is hard, trying to see the through line that carries you and the reader through. It is exciting to have that much space and potential. Short stories are unforgiving because nothing can be out of place in the plot or the writing, there is no space for a bad note. At the same time there is something very beautiful about the brevity which allows for it to exist fully in the writer’s mind and be turned and examined. You’ve cited Shirley Jackson and Stephen King as influences. Tell us about them and any others.I grew up with horror writers and I love being scared. My writing begins, always, with reading. I love Garth Greenwell, Annie Proulx, Keri Hulme, Gabriel García Márquez, Solvej Balle, Yoko Ogawa. I like propulsion and excellent writing. What is the attraction of horror?Behind the monster there is almost always a mirror that shows life and humanity. What projects are you working on?New things, gentle explorations. Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?I walked up the river to Iris Murdoch’s house once and stood outside to see if I could, by osmosis, get anything good. What is the best writing advice you have heard?Be brave, strike out from the shore. You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?The dissolution of borders. Which current book, film and podcast would you recommend?Lambs of God by Marele Day; Arrival; the A24 film podcast. Which public event affected you most?The ongoing genocide in Palestine. The most remarkable place you have visited?Rome. Your most treasured possession?My sanity. What is the most beautiful book that you own?They are all beautiful. Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?Helen Garner, Jeanette Winterson, Virginia Woolf, Olga Ravn. The best and worst things about Oxford, where you live?The best: the water, the libraries, the trees, the murmuration. The worst: the nimbyism, the cars. What is your favourite quotation?Currently, “The only true voyage of discovery ... would be not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.” ― Marcel Proust, The Captive/The FugitiveWho is your favourite fictional character?Currently, Marie de France from Matrix by Lauren Groff. A book to make me laugh?A Room with a View by EM Forster. A book that might move me to tears?Women Talking by Miriam Toews. Long Wave is published by Jonathan Cape.[ Praise for Dolly Parton’s work bringing love of books to children in IrelandOpens in new window ]