What’s the first book you remember reading as a child? My mum read to me from a book of English folk tales. I used to love one in particular about someone stealing a bone from a graveyard and making a stew with it. I can vividly remember the illustration on the opposite page: a woman trembling under a patchwork quilt, a ghost reaching out to her from a crack in her bedside table door.

What was the book you read that made you decide to be a writer? I don’t think of a single book; more a slow accumulation, like a bird building its nest.

What’s your favourite first line in a book? Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs Of A Polar Bear: ‘Someone tickled me behind my ears, under my arms. I curled up, becoming a full moon, and rolled on the floor.’ I like unassuming first lines where strangeness takes its time to reveal itself; sometimes there is too much pressure, I think, to come up with something pithy and expansive, like an advertising slogan.

Which debut publication had the most profound effect on you? Reading The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison transformed the way I saw and understood the world, and my understanding of what writing could do and be. I think a lot about the depth, daring and lightness of touch of The Bluest Eye when I write.

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up on a writing day? Feed my cat, who then yells at me until I pet her. She doesn’t care about my writing, which is sometimes a useful reminder.

What’s the first thing you do when you’ve stopped writing for the day? Back up what I’ve written about a hundred times! I had a close call with Whale Fall and have learnt my lesson.

In a parallel universe where you’re the tyrant leader of a dystopian civilisation, what’s the first book you’d burn? A very odd screenplay I wrote as a teenager about a colony of ravens. 

What’s the first piece of advice you’d offer to an aspiring novelist? Not to give up. Rejection is part and parcel of writing: it’s how we figure out where we want to grow, and also what we believe in with our writing. You have to keep going and follow the things that excite you.
Elizabeth O’Connor: Whale Fall is published by Picador on Thursday 25 April; main picture: Ilona Denton.