BEST AUTHOR BEST : KEVIN BARRY

To inspire his Montana-set new novel, '' The Heart in Winter,'' he listened to '' heartsore '' Irish ballads, polkas and reels. '' I was an emotional basket case,'' he says, '' which was exactly where I needed to be.''

.-  What books are on your night stand?

I'm neck deep in Willy Vlautin's new novel, '' The Horse,'' and it's just as good as all his other books. I just finished Caleb Azumah Nelson's '' Small Worlds,'' a beguiling take on first love in Peckham and the spiritual release of dancing.

I also recently dug Sheila Heit's '' Alphabetical Diaries, '' an artful cut-up of her journals, and Vinson Cunnigham's elegant '' Great Expectations.''

.-  Describe your ideal experience.

Probably a filthy winter's night at home in County Sligo, in the bed, with the rain rattling the windows and the wind shaking the four corners house, and a fire in the grate, and I'm probably rereading something old and beloved and slightly eccentric like a Jean Rhys or a V.S. Pritchett of an Iris Murdoch.

.-  Why did you decide to set '' The Heart in Winter '' in America?

In the summer of 1999, I was walking in the mountains in West Cork in Ireland when I came across some abandoned mines. I learned that they'd played out in the 1880s and all the miners had left for Butte, Mont.

I thought, '' This is a western, but with County Cork accents - I'm in. ''

.-  Do you write to music? What were you listening to while working on the book?

I do : I try to influence the writing, to score it. For '' The Heart in Winter,'' I listened to the heartsore ballads by the Irish tenor Count John McCormack, lots of old Polkas and reels, the '' Badlands'' soundtrack, country love songs by Jimmy Dale Gilmore.

Tom waits doing '' Somewhere.'' I was an emotional basket case from it all, up to my eyes in old romance, which was exactly where I needed to be.

.-  What book should everybody read before the age of 21?

'' Finnegans Wake,'' by James Joyce. The more freethinking and malleable you are going into it, the better, and so openhearted youth may be the ideal condition.

It might also knock any nonsense about books needing plots out of young readers' minds.

.-  How have your reading tastes changed over time?

Hardly at all. I was first flung to the wall by a piece of literature when I was 10 years old - I was home from school pretending to have the flu and I picked up '' Wuthering Heights ,'' by Emily Bronte, and was soon moaning with lachrymose pleasure.

I remain a capital ''R'' Romantic, as a reader and as a writer both.  

.-  What's the last great book you read?

Probably a reread of '' The Executioner's Song,'' by Norman Mailer. The thousand-page portrait of the  Utah killer Garry Gilmore achieves an incredible bland poetry, perhaps because the author [ uncharacteristically ] kept himself out of it.

.-  You're organising a literary dinner party. Which three writers dead or alive, do you invite?

Anthony Burgess, Patricia Highsmith, Theodore Roethke. I think this one can go on to a very wee hour, and in quite a lovely style, especially if there's a stand-up piano for Mr. Burgess to tinker with.

The World Students Society thanks The New York Times.