Andrew Mayden

The author of Audition, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, talks about her love of Steinbeck and Dreiser, and how almost every book changes the way she thinks about the world

The inspirations behind my Booker-longlisted book 

The starting point for Audition was a desire to write about the long process through which children must necessarily grow up to become strangers to their own parents. I wanted to write about how certain universal experiences – of love, of motherhood – can sometimes feel like two mutually exclusive things at the same time. But rather than writing about that contradiction, I wanted to write it directly – to embed it in the structure of the novel. Reading the book requires holding two separate versions of events in your head at the same time. It’s either/or, and also and. As a culture, we’re becoming quite bad at holding a contradiction in our heads. And yet we live in a time of profound and increasing cognitive dissonance.

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