Moniza Alvi’s seven collections of poetry include The Country at My Shoulder, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and the Whitbread poetry prizes and Europa, also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize. Her most recent collection is Homesick for the Earth, versions of the French poet, Jules Supervielle. She received a Cholmondeley Award for poetry from the Society of Authors in 2002

What are you reading these days?

I’ve just finished reading Mary McCarthy’s The Group. It’s a brilliant razor-sharp novel featuring a group of young women in the US as they embark on life after leaving Vassar College, New York. I wish I’d read it when I was younger, it’s so insightful! I’ve now embarked on Viktoria Schweitzer’s biography of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva.

Which books are on your bedside table?

Books by my bed — The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges, The River Underground, poems and prose by the French writer Jean Tardieu, translated by David Kelly, and Joan Lidoff’s book on the Australian novelist Christina Stead.

Which titles are on your bucket list of books?

This would include the second and third of my three Penguin volumes of Proust, and stories/novels by P.G. Wodehouse.

What is the one book/author you feel everyone must read?

W.G. Sebald. (If I could be allowed to break the rules and have another, it would be Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which was a real eye-opener for me.)

What are you planning to reread?

Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Sylvia Plath’s The Collected Poems.

What is the one book you read because you thought it would make you appear smarter?

As a nine-year-old I tried to read The Old Curiosity Shop by Dickens to prove to myself that I could. I managed to get about halfway through. In adult years I don’t think I’ve had the staying power to read even half a book to impress.

What is the one book you started reading but could not finish?

There’s more than one, in fact, there’s quite a few. There’s Villette by Charlotte Brontë. But I’d like to try it again — it was highly recommended to me.

What is your favourite childhood book or story?

Again, it’s hard to choose one, but Heidi was a book I read a few times and was always completely swept up by. I found it very distressing when she was sent away from the mountains and a great relief when she was allowed to return!