Adam Foulds was born in 1974, graduated Oxford University, earned an MA in a creative writing at the University of East Anglia and now lives in South London. His book-length narrative poem, The Broken Word, won the 2008 Whitbread Costa Poetry Award. His first novel, The Truth About These Strange Times, was published in 2007 and he was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2008. The Quickening Maze, to be published here by Penguin next Tuesday, June 29, was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize.
On your nightstand now:
I've just gone to check and I'm slightly surprised by what I found: Lao-Tzu's Tao Te Ching, Collected Works of John Milton, Robert Fagles's translation of The Iliad. No wonder I have trouble sleeping.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I didn't read much fiction as a child. I preferred factual books. I remember one particularly about marine life. I loved the silence of its pictures. There was an absurd inflated puffer fish like a spiny golf ball with worried eyes, a large and dextrous octopus, a conger eel issuing from a rock, its rounded jaws frightening with many tiny teeth.
Your top five authors:
Homer. Shakespeare. Tolstoy. Hm, top three are easy. After that... Dickens, Joyce.
Book you've faked reading:
Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities. I haven't exactly faked it. It's just that I've just never got beyond the first few hundred pages.
Book you're an evangelist for:
I've pressed on friends and written about a book called The Peregrine by J.A. Baker. It's the observation diary of a man who spent one autumn through to spring watching a pair of peregrine falcons. It is written in an extraordinary prose that is pared down, precise but also lavish and surprising in its images, all in pursuit of the reality of those birds. It feels pretty much as far as one could go in trying to live inside the mind of another creature, another way of seeing the world.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Steve Davis Plays Chess.
Book that changed your life:
All the good ones do. My first reading passion as a teenager was Keats and I still have the same Penguin Classics edition. That book filled my mind with its music for a long time and provoked many of my own early attempts at poems. Later on it was Flaubert's Madame Bovary. That taught me a novel could be as thoroughly composed and intense as poetry and opened an important door for me.
Favorite line from a book:
This really is an impossible question. So, almost at random: "The sluggish cream wound curdling spirals through her tea" from Joyce's Ulysses, or "Gold holly in the fireplace" from Christopher Logue's version of The Iliad, or "The rain beat against the windows all night long" from Chekhov's "Gooseberries," or "One morning, after a night of uneasy dreams, Gregor Samsa awoke to find himself transformed into a giant insect." Kafka, of course.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Pretty much my most intense reading experience ever was Joyce's short story "The Dead." The modulation from the body of the story at the party through the quieter, revelatory scene at home to its visionary ending lifted me irresistibly into its intended state of pure apprehension and completed emotional experience. You can't get it the second time because you know what's coming. The first time I read it I was breathless and couldn't sit down for a while. I wandered, marveling at it.
