Book review: Author’s search for meaning in an impermanent world

Ruth Ozeki talks to Lisa Allardice about her Women’s prize-winning novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness, which is rooted in how she experienced the loss of her father

Ruth Ozeki, author of ‘The Book of Form and Emptiness’, was announced as the winner of the The Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022 at the awards ceremony in Bedford Square Gardens on June 15, in London. Picture: Getty

The first thing the Japanese American author Ruth Ozeki did the morning after winning the Women’s prize for fiction was to meditate. “A very short one”, she says when we meet at her hotel later. She was so convinced she wasn’t going to win (Meg Mason and Elif Shafak were the frontrunners) that she had planned a full schedule for the day.

“Not that I’m complaining,” she says. Coolly elegant in black, despite the heatwave, the 66-year-old writer has the sort of glow not often seen in post-award ceremony interviews.