DRAGON: Daisy Johnson / ‘I wasn’t a fan of David Szalay, but Flesh is a masterpiece’

Thursday, March 26, 2026

Daisy Johnson / ‘I wasn’t a fan of David Szalay, but Flesh is a masterpiece’

The Booker-shortlisted author on a momentous teenage encounter with The Bone People, getting a buzz from Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla, and trying to avoid The Lorax

Daisy Johnson

Friday 13 March 2026

My earliest reading memory
Memories from my childhood are opening up as I read to my own young children at the moment. Something in the pictures of Helen Cooper’s The Bear Under the Stairs or Lane Smith’s The Big Petstakes me back to being four years old and being read to.

My favourite book growing up
I love the Sabriel series by Garth Nix and first read it alongside my father and, later, my younger brother. It was truly a shared joy to be immersed in that world, for a book to give us a new connection to one another.

The book that changed me as a teenager
I don’t remember what age I was when I found The Bone People by Keri Hulme on my parents’ bookshelf, probably too young. I was a swirling hurricane of a teenager and reading about Kerewin alone in her tower felt momentous. There was something about the way that the anger and fear in the book bury into the writing.

The writer who changed my mind
I think my mind is being changed by writing all of the time, but most recently Ed Yong’s book about animal senses, An Immense World, completely changed my perspective on the world around us. Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad is one of the books about the genocide of the Palestinian people that has started to educate me. Women Talking by Miriam Toews showed me what fiction could be capable of.

The book that made me want to be a writer
It probably happened slowly, without my really realising. I think the Alfie books by Shirley Hughes were a beginning – the beautiful domesticity, the pacing. The first time I actually remember having that envious buzzing feeling of “What if I could do this?” was probably with Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg.

The book or author I came back to
In a previous interview I said I was not a fan of David Szalay, but I think that Flesh is a masterpiece.

The book I reread
I reread all of the time. Both as a reader, for love, and as a writer. There is such delight in finding new things, in the writing, in yourself. Both Orlando and Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf are books I first read as a literature student and have returned to later and again, very recently.

The book I could never read again
I wish I never had to read Dr Seuss’s The Lorax again; where can I hide it?

The book I discovered later in life
I have only recently picked up A Room With a View by EM Forster, after loving Lucy Honeychurch in the film, and it is so wonderful and funny. I have also just started reading the work of Yōko Ogawa, a brilliant writer.

The book I am currently reading

One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson – and I’m listening to The Poisoned King by Katherine Rundell.

My comfort read
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx.

THE GUARDIAN