Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room, which has been shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, discusses the five books that have most influenced her writing, from Dostoyevsky to Marguerite Duras. She muses on the question of what fiction can offer: "A novel itself, if it is good, and effective at whatever its particular aesthetic and philosophical aim is, can answer the question best, so that a novelist doesn’t have to."

Canadian author Esi Edugyan, whose novel Washington Black is shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, picks five books that have inspired her novels, and shares wisdom on what it means to read fiction today

"That’s what writing is: a struggle with oneself." Scottish poet Robin Robertson—author of the verse novel The Long Take, shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize—lists the five works that have most influenced his writing, from Ulysses to Heaney.

Daisy Johnson—short story writer, novelist, and the youngest author to be shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize—chooses the five books that most inspired her novel Everything Under and shares some of her writing rituals and philosophy.

Sagas old and new, from Gisli Sursson’s trials to Knausgård’s struggle, form the backbone of Roy Jacobsen’s selection of essential fiction from Norway, a country that is like ‘a black and not very polished diamond’, and where writers and readers seek out the human, ‘no matter how awkward, grandiose, sentimental, nostalgic, embarrassing, hyperbolic, stupid, hilarious or dangerous it may be’

David Grossman, renowned Israeli author and winner of the 2017 Man Booker International Prize, shares the books that have shaped his writing, from Sholem Aleichem to James Joyce and Elsa Morante

Study of the ‘Orient’ and Orientalism has evolved considerably since Edward Said's seminal study of 1978. Here, the multi-award winning French novelist Mathias Enard, whose own novel, Compass, draws on this rich history, discusses five books that capture key aspects of this ever-shifting terrain

Minimalism is big with the Danes while Icelanders favour magical realism; the Swedes keep it classical while the Norwegians get emotional. Man Booker International shortlistee Dorthe Nors takes us on a tour of the most exciting voices in contemporary Scandinavian literature.