AK Blakemore: 'The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt was extremely silly and bad'

AK Blakemore, the poet and author of The Glutton, has dismissed Donna Tartt's Pulitzer-winning The Goldfinch as "extremely silly and bad". The verdict opens her interview with the Guardian's books desk, published 9 October, in which she also names F Scott Fitzgerald's novel she calls perfect and admits she has lost faith in Ernest Hemingway.

Blakemore's literary memory begins not with Fitzgerald but with dogs. Her earliest reading memory, she says, is Lynley Dodd's Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy, the picture book in which an assortment of differently shaped dogs go on a walk.

"The great dane (Hercules Morse, as big as a horse), the dalmatian (Bottomley Potts, covered in spots), the dachshund (Schnitzel Von Krumm with a very low tum) … I could probably still recite most of it from memory," Blakemore said.

What shapes a novelist of appetite?

Her favourite book growing up carried a darker charge. Blakemore owned many picture books illustrated by Korky Paul, now best known for the Winnie the Witch series, and remembers being obsessed, even as quite a young child, with the intricate grotesquerie of it all.

Her favourite was The Rascally Cake by Jeanne Willis. Its plot: a rotund, green-haired man called Rufus Skumskins O'Parsley makes a cake out of disgusting things — rotten eggs, spider legs, garden snails — only for the cake to come to life and attempt to eat him.

Blakemore draws a direct line from that picture book to her own fiction. "Probably more than a little bit of Skumskins found its way into the protagonist of my second novel, The Glutton," she said.

The Glutton, her second novel, follows a protagonist whose appetites echo the green-haired cake-maker of her childhood reading.

What does this change for readers?

The interview positions Blakemore as a critic unafraid of sharp judgments on canonical names — Tartt silly, Hemingway lost. Her formative canon runs from Dodd's dogs to Willis's rascally cake, and she traces her own work back to it with unusual candour.

The full interview, in which Blakemore names Fitzgerald's perfect novel and the recent debut that blew her away, continues at the Guardian.