Deborah Levy’s novel Swimming Home was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Set in the South of France, it is the story of Joe, a poet who arrives with his family at their villa in Nice. There he discovers what he thinks is the body of a bear in the pool. On closer inspection he finds it is the body of Kitty Finch, still very much alive. Beautiful and unhinged, Kitty’s arrival sends ripples through the surface of already fraught family holiday, bringing each character to breaking point. Here Deborah Levy spoke to our then online editor Ted Hodgkinson about why as she wants to resist anything resembling a comfort zone and why writing fiction is about ‘finding reasons to live’. Swimming Home by Deborah Levy is published by And Other Stories and Faber & Faber.