Edmund de Waal: ‘If I need to forget every­thing, I read Lee Child. Honestly’

The artist, potter and author on his middle-of-the-night anxiety reading, wanting to be a poet, and the Japanese classic he wishes he had read

The book I am currently reading
It’s never one book. I am now liberated from reading about Paris so I’m finishing Hermione Lee’s great biography of Tom Stoppard and feeling exhilarated by the stretch of ideas within it. I’m on the last chapters of Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds and don’t want it to end. And I’m deeply moved by Durs Grünbein’s Porcelain, his paean to the destruction of Dresden, translated by Karen Leeder. I didn’t know his poetry and have become an evangelist.

The book that changed my life
Primo Levi’s The Wrench. It is his novel about why we make things, what it means to slowly create an object. It felt that someone knew that books were a kind of making.

Edmund de Waal’s new book, Letters to Camondo, is published by Chatto & Windus, £14.99. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.