Tilda Swinton on books, collaborators and the museum catalog Ongoing

Tilda Swinton discussed her reading habits and longtime collaborators in an email interview that accompanies Ongoing, the museum catalog for a retrospective of her work. The catalog, loaded with film and fashion photos, also includes commentary by many of her steady collaborators; Swinton praised P.G. Wodehouse and Muriel Spark in the interview.

She described her ideal reading set-up as in or on her bed in the morning, with the window open, the house quiet, her phone mislaid, a third of the way through a book and dogs nearby. She said her books "organize themselves" and that she rarely writes poetry now but reads it often.

Swinton named Richard Scarry's What Do People Do All Day? as the best book she received as a gift, and said she rereads Virginia Woolf's Orlando about once every four or five years to check her evolution against it. She said Derek Jarman introduced her to James Hillman, David Bowie introduced her to Georges Rodenbach's Bruges-la-Morte, and cited Floc'h's Une Vie Exemplaire as a favorite lesser-known book.

She said she included a short "Notes for Radical Living" in Ongoing after a friend asked for a sentence of encouragement, quoted a line from Talladega Nights in the book and called herself a die-hard fan of that film. Swinton also said she is not writing a memoir; the interview does not announce other upcoming projects.

Key Topics

Culture, Tilda Swinton, Ongoing, Orlando, Sally Potter, P.g. Wodehouse