Who's your mentor?

William Shawn, legendary editor of the New Yorker from 1952 to 1987. He was the second editor, so he didn't invent it, but he moved it from a high quality magazine of a certain kind to something unique in its character and influence. He's a sainted figure. There are any number of memoirs in which staffers recall him as a man of extraordinary intelligence and gentleness. We now know that he was having an affair for years with one of those staffers, he was very eccentric, an agoraphobe of some kind. In order to cope with that, he had a number of peculiar obsessions. He was terri"ed of cold, so his office was always roasting.

His failing is that he botched his succession really badly. He was an old man by the time people started talking about the next editor. He took too long and that paralysed the magazine for a number of years. He had become synonomous with the magazine. It was ugly but not surprising.

How did you first get to know about/come across Shawn?

I would have known about the New Yorker growing up and read it seriously from university age. Shawn would have been on until right around then. I wasn't ever aware of him as the living editor. I first became aware of him through a Lis Harris at Wesleyan University in Connecticut who was a staff writer at the New Yorker who had worked under Shawn . . . worked her way up from secretary at staff writer. It was her talking about this extraordinary man. It was one of the first times I was aware of how important an editor can be. The work of a fine writer is not unmediated.

How did his work influence you?

Shawn was at the top of a substantial pyramid and a very complex system of sharing work, but he did a lot of hands-on line-editing, even as top editor responsible for commissioning. That is something in publishing . . . today there is this idea that there is one kind of editor who commissions and another who works on copy. I've always been an editor who comes up with material and works on texts and works with authors closely. Shawn is the greatest example of someone who never stopped doing that. He never lost touch with the text. I spend hours working on writers with their texts.

What qualities made him a good leader?

The main thing he had going for him was that he was so good at what he did and he was so considerate that the people who worked for him loved him in a genuinely deep sense. Not aware of him having brilliant management secrets and I don't think he would have thought about it as a category of his own. But obviously he did have to manage a staff of enormous talent and ego. His style didn't always work, but it mostly did by leading by example and showing decency and warmth.

The New Yorker was sometimes mocked for oldfashionedness. Tom Wolfe wrote a piece taking the mickey out of Shawn. The magazine took itself phenomenally seriously.

What did you learn from his work?

He was an editor of genius who created whole styles of literary journalism and brought them to a level of polish nobody else has been able to rival. The NY under Shawn was a mixture of work by true artists and also journalistic pieces by great craftspeople who worked to a very strong system.

He would have recognised the difference between that sort of work and the sort of thing Truman Capote would have done. So many great books started their lives as New Yorker pieces. The magazine ran pieces of tens of thousands of words, giving space to writers as nobody else did. Apart from the amount of editing and fact checking, there was no sense that writers had to squeeze their work into predetermined slots. They were allowed to express themselves and write books in the guise of magazine articles.