Born in east London in 1984, playwright and screenwriter Lucy Kirkwood studied English literature at the University of Edinburgh and wrote her first play in 2005. Since then, she has written for stage and television, including the E4 series Skins. Her play Chimerica examined the relationship between America and China, winning the Olivier award in 2014 for best new play. In 2018 she was elected fellow of the Royal Society of Literature as part of their 40 Under 40 initiative. Kirkwood’s latest work, The Welkin, starring Maxine Peake, opens at the National Theatre on 15 January.

1. Nonfiction
Chamber Music: About the Wu-Tang (in 36 pieces) by Will Ashon

I read Will’s brilliant book about Epping Forest [Strange Labyrinth] and was dazzled by it, so already had high expectations for this. I’m a fan of the Wu-Tang Clan, but there’s so much in Chamber Music even for hip-hop agnostics. It’s got the slight feel (wonderfully so) of one of those pinboards detectives have in movies with red strings going all over the place, as he uses one album to build a portrait of an entire culture, from Black Lives Matter to the legacy of the Clinton administration, via Ralph Lauren polo shirts. More than a book about a band, it’s a book about America.

2. Music
In Between Tears by Irma Thomas

I listen to this album almost every week. Pretty much all the songs are about being desperately in love with someone who’s already married, or being that man’s poor, betrayed wife, and the way Thomas slips between them knocks my socks off – I can’t think of another album that moves between points of view like that. She sings pain with such frayed, truthful soul, but the spoken word riff at the start of the B-side always makes me laugh out loud in the car. I hope if my heart is ever broken, I can be as magnificent in the face of it.

3. Art
Òran Mór mural by Alasdair Gray

I studied in Edinburgh and it was there I was first introduced to the work of Alasdair Gray, for which I’m so grateful. Reading Lanark was the first time I had ever been properly exhilarated by a novel and I have loved his writing and his art ever since. His recent death has made me determined to make a pilgrimage back to Scotland to pay a visit to his mural on the ceiling in the Òran Mór in Glasgow. I will have Lanark in my pocket and toast him with something peaty.

4. Film
Border (dir Ali Abbasi, 2018)

I saw this Swedish film last year and couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks. It’s a love story and a horror movie, but above all a very beautiful fairytale about otherness, desire and what makes us human. It’s the tale of a customs officer at the border of Sweden and Finland with, let’s say, animalistic characteristics that make her very good at her job as a human sniffer dog but isolate her from other people. I don’t want to say more than that; its surprises are so perfectly crafted I might spoil them, but it has the most extraordinary sex scene ever committed to film.

5. TV
Joe Pera Talks With You (Adult Swim, watch on All 4)

The pleasure of some art is being so immersed in another point of view that your own self disappears completely, and at the end of it, maybe for minutes, maybe hours, maybe even days, your internal metronome is set to a different rhythm. Sometimes, this is unsettling (Gordon Burn’s Happy Like Murderers put me in the head of Fred West to a disturbing degree), sometimes, it’s transcendental (listening to Philip Glass’s Satyagraha seems to change the whole structure of time), but sometimes it’s just joyful: that’s what happens when I watch gentle Joe Pera talk about a different subject each week, from the breakfasts at his local diner to the rat wars of Alberta, Canada. The show is like a very funny, endearing warm bath that avoids any Forrest Gumpiness with flashes of surrealism and hints at a well of sadness beneath Pera’s radiant kindness.

6. Sport
Jürgen Klopp

I’m not that interested in sport, and I’ve got no truck with people wishing plays were like football matches, but I’m so glad Jürgen Klopp is in the world and not only because my husband is a Liverpool fan. In the age of Trump and Johnson, he delights me as an example of what male leadership can look like: passionate, humorous, generous, kind, driven by humility and integrity and, above all, decency. My husband loads up clips from post-match interviews and match highlights for me to watch and without fail Klopp makes me laugh or my heart swell, whether he’s complimenting the male translator on his erotic voice, or getting so excited at a victory over Norwich that he breaks his glasses. Also I have instant affection for anyone who’s been a professional sportsperson and a smoker at the same time.