Ruth Ozeki on the Power of Language and Her Literary Influences

Ruth Ozeki, winner of the 2022 Women's Prize for Fiction for 'The Book of Form and Emptiness', discusses her literary influences in an interview. The US author, film-maker, and Zen Buddhist priest reveals that all her books attempt to recreate E.B. White's 'Charlotte's Web', which she considers the perfect book about the power of language to save lives. She credits 'The Catcher in the Rye' for teaching her adolescent survival skills of disaffected attitude and spotting phonies. Reading Gabriel García Márquez's 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' in 1975 during a trek in Nepal introduced her to magic realism. Ozeki notes that many childhood books featured smart girl writers like Harriet the Spy and Jo March. She distinguishes irony from cynicism through Kurt Vonnegut's work. Her current reads include Isabel J Kim's 'Sublimation' and 'The Typewriter Revolution'. She finds comfort in Lydia Davis's 'Collected Stories'.