I assist Jessica Woollard with her list and am also starting to build my own. Jessica’s list covers a very broad range of disciplines and genres, but it is unified by Jessica’s boundless curiosity and the firm belief that quality writing can make any subject sing. This uncynical and passionate approach is something I hope to emulate.

I share Jessica’s keen interest in non-fiction by experts which encourages readers to reevaluate the everyday. I especially enjoy books which use a hyper-specific (and often mistakenly overlooked) focus to unpick a thread which then causes the whole tapestry to unravel. I love coming away from a work of non-fiction feeling like I have been given a tiny key which unlocks a whole new way of thinking. This could be anything from lichen to money laundering  – so long as the focus opens out to bigger philosophical or political questions.

I am keen to learn something new and therefore welcome surprising and niche submissions. However, my main areas of personal interest are social history, anthropology, subcultures, art and design. I am also very interested in food writing, especially where food is used as a lens to explore bigger questions relating to memory, social capital and place. In addition to more straight narrative non-fiction, I enjoy reading creative scholarship, cultural criticism, essays, literary biography and memoir.

I always read with a pencil and I most admire writing that makes me sit up and pay attention at a sentence level. I am also interested in works that engage with form. Be it through genre, intertextuality, or a playful engagement with the slippage between fiction and non-fiction, text and surface – such creative ambition always excites me. Artful, Trust, Kick the Latch, Real Estate, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, The Death of Francis Bacon, and Small Fires are a few of my favourites for this reason.

My fiction taste is broad and I enjoy literary works which cover a wide range of subjects and moods, so long as there is a close focus on language and voice. For example, Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat, Claire Keegan’s So Late in the Day and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge are three books which I have recently loved. They are all tonally very different, but each one is the work of an author in total control of their craft. Perhaps not coincidentally, those three books also all follow a plot with a relatively narrow scope (a single event, a relationship and life in a small town) and this is very indicative of my taste. I prefer narratives that are not claustrophobic or too psychologically interior, but confident enough to deem the local, intimate and domestic of literary importance. I enjoy books which slide into the uncanny or strange such as O Caledonia and Cursed Bread, but fantasy and traditional horror submissions wouldn’t be for me.