“How can I know what I think, until I see what I say?” (E. M. Forster). How much of your writing surprises you?
I would say all and none of it. The fiction-writing process for me is a bit like trying to construct a semi-autonomous device, one that, at best, ends up as a more or less functional prototype. What the prototype produces, when it is finally switched on, is always surprising but also somehow strangely familiar.
What is the first thing you remember reading or being read to?
Marvel UK’s The Titans comics, which I remember reading at Tollgate Primary School in east London. My favourite character was The Vision, who could dematerialize or make his body as hard as diamond. This must have been somehow both inspiring and consoling to my young self-conscious self (although I can’t now remember why).
Is there a particular sentence that has stayed with you throughout your life?
The opening sentence of Samuel Beckett’s novel Murphy is hard to beat: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new”.
What is the most interesting item on your bookshelf?
El libro de los Ascensores de Valparaíso by Juan Torre Barca. Valparaíso in Chile is built around a circular bay on dozens of hillsides overlooking the Pacific, with a grid of public and commercial buildings at its lower level and a labyrinth of residential streets and cobblestone alleyways higher up. Connecting the two are precipitous and dilapidated ascensores, or funiculars, of various heights and capacities. I was there in the year 2000, the year my father died, and it left a lasting impression. The book contains a series of charming line drawings of the funiculars by the author alongside his commentary – a rare and idiosyncratic gem, published a couple of years before my visit.
Have you ever regretted publishing something?
No, not really. The longer the lead time the happier I am likely to be with the end product, as I need time for things to percolate. I had a long time to think about the answers to these questions, so no excuses.
Proust had madeleines. Which foods or meals trigger your memory?
Food doesn’t really have that effect on me. But Proust’s narrator also had the uneven paving-stones in the Guermantes courtyard, which transported him to the baptistery of St. Mark’s in Venice, and, shortly after that, the sound of a spoon knocking against a plate in the library at the Guermantes mansion, which transported him to a railway carriage that had stopped near a little wood on a train journey that would eventually take him back to Paris after many years away. Interactions with the physical environment are much more likely to trigger involuntary memories for me, such as the sound of a loose flagstone as I crossed it this week, which took me back two decades to cycling along the canal towpath towards central London after I’d moved back to east London at the end of my first marriage.
Have you had any notable experiences meeting authors you admire?
The great Ben Okri very helpfully asked me whether I had a profession when I told him I was aspiring to write (at a Hay Festival book-signing many years ago). He responded positively when I told him I’d studied engineering: something solid to fall back on.
Do you have a favourite bookshop?
The Book Hive in Norwich. Responsible for publishing Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. This makes it East Anglia’s equivalent of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company in Paris, which originally published Ulysses.
How does distraction inform your writing?
I don’t think it does. To the extent that I’m distracted then I’m not writing. Concentration – in the sense of an ability to remain undistracted by what is not implicit in the narrative sequence in question (to paraphrase Fredric Jameson) – is key to the writing process for me.
What are you currently reading or watching?
I am reading a pile of novels for the Goldsmiths Prize. The shortlist was announced on October 2, immediately after Geoff Dyer’s New Statesman/Goldsmiths Prize lecture on “Why the Novel Matters”, at London’s Southbank Centre.
Who has influenced your writing?
Beckett, in particular, has enabled me to tell stories by way of forms I never knew I was allowed to use (to paraphrase Fredric Jameson again).
Which piece of music have you listened to the most in your life?
A few months after my dad’s death, we renewed my mother’s passport – which had expired before my older brother was born – so that we could travel to Denmark, which my parents hadn’t been able to visit when I was living there in the early 1990s. We attended a concert of Bach cantatas performed by the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists in Copenhagen’s Garnisonskirken, a few doors down from where I used to live, on Sankt Annæ Plads. Those cantatas (BWV 47, 114 and 148) have been revolving in my mind (if not on my virtual turntable) ever since.
Do your ideas form themselves in your head or on the page?
I resist this binary, as I think each feeds the other. A certain amount of cognitive pump-priming is needed before ideas form on the page (and vice versa).
What is the worst job you ever had?
Working on the land in Norfolk – or in a factory just south of the border in Suffolk – during my summer breaks from university might, on the face of it, seem to be the worst. But in reality jobs are only ever as good as the people involved in them, and I enjoyed the company of those particular co-workers.
If you could choose any piece of art to hang above your desk, what would it be?
It would be one of Mondrian’s late compositions, such as “Tableau No. X, with Yellow, Black, Red and Blue”, from 1925, although I am actually quite happy with the piece of art that is already hanging above my desk: “Night” by my friend Vidyadaka, whose work has its own wonderful/unique geometrical elegance.
What was your favourite text studied at school?
Mathematics was my favourite subject, so I will say my book of logarithmic tables!
Which font do you write in?
I continue to use Times New Roman having started using this as Word’s (and, before that, WordPerfect’s) default font in the early 1990s when I returned from Denmark to work in London. My favourite font, though, would have to be that produced by the Olivetti Lettera 32 manual typewriter that I bought in Mexico City’s Portal of the Evangelists on the west side of Plaza de Santo Domingo – the “place of the scribes” – after quitting my job and heading off on the road in the mid-1990s.
What does a writing day look like for you?
I write fiction on Wednesday and Sunday mornings between March 1 and October 31 (inclusive). Pre-pandemic I would mostly have written on the first floor of cafés in central London (and I am always on the lookout for new multistorey cafés in the city); now it is more likely to be at home. I write non-fiction or edit my novel-in-progress on the other days of the week (and during the winter), which is something I do at home or even in a ground-floor café. All of this is done around the edges of my (freelance) day job.
Which other art forms are necessary to your writing?
Mathematics is the “art form” that is most necessary to my current writing project: a novel about a man rolling from his side onto his back, and back again, within a moving enclosure. I like Reviel Netz’s definition (from A New History of Greek Mathematics) of this ancient “literary genre” as something that encompasses geometry, astronomy, optics and mechanics, as well as what we now think of as the exact sciences.
Where do you seek refuge?
This is the hardest and easiest of these questions for me to answer. It is the hardest because it goes to the heart of what is most important to me, which is something very personal and very difficult to articulate. And it is the easiest because the language of “seeking refuge” is one that is used in the “belief system” that I subscribe to, which is that of Buddhism. One way of describing this refuge, for me, is the possibility – the reality – of finding fulfilment to the extent that I can move beyond self-reference: a sense of the creative process having a life of its own.
Simon Okotie is the author of the book-length essay The Future of the Novel (2025), published by Melville House. His novels Whatever Happened to Harold Absalon? (2012), In the Absence of Absalon (2017) and After Absalon (2020) are published by Salt.
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