Wanderlust · 6 min read · September 19, 2025

An interview with author Sophie Haydock

'On holiday, time slows down. You're unhooked from chores, so you can sink into the author's worldbuilding'

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Author Sophie Haydock shares how travel enhances the reading experience, allowing time to fully immerse in storytelling without daily distractions. She reflects on how settings like France and Italy have inspired her writing, and highlights the joy of reading novels set in the places you're visiting. Whether it's a short story on a sunlounger or an audiobook on the go, Sophie encourages guilt-free reading – whatever format or genre brings you joy.

We sat down with our new favourite author, Sophie Haydock, to talk travel, beach reads and storytelling, and how books have that unique ability to transport you to pretty much any destination – whether you're on holiday or just exploring secret new corners of your own hometown.

Books hit different on holiday

Fresh from a trip to Portugal, we ask Sophie how many books she managed to read while away.

'I was really happy to read three books, which I felt for me was a nice amount on the beach, you know. You get the page turning. You get really hooked in that setting and that world building. It was so nice, I really got back into my reading flow.'

And it's that extra time on holiday that lets us properly get into a book, lose ourselves in it to some degree. Sophie had some thoughts about why that might be.

'I think everything happens hopefully on holiday just a little bit more slowly, and we're really unhooked from our daily lives. So you don't have to be doing the laundry and putting the dishwasher on and hoovering around and feeding the kids or the cats. So everything's got a little bit more time to unfold.'

'And I think with novels in particular, you know, they can be three, four-hundred page novels and at home, it can take six months. You're reading a couple of pages when you're exhausted in bed and you fall asleep. On the next night, you've forgotten what's happened. And I think the really lovely thing about holiday is just that time expands and you can really sink into the author's worldbuilding and the storytelling, and you can speed through a few chapters and everything just lives so much more vividly, and you kind of get to know the characters a bit better.'

We went on to talk about how reading something set in the destination you're visiting can even heighten your immersion and give you a deeper understanding that you might not get just from absorbing facts.

'There's something really magical about reading novels that are set in places that you might be visiting. And maybe that's… because fiction, like travel, you know, it really demands curiosity and it demands attention and it demands that you look.'

'You suddenly think, I can hear that, you know, that description, or I can smell the lovely food that a character is cooking. You're really attuned, aren't you? That's definitely something that I think holiday awakens in us.'

Inspiration to travel. Inspiration to write.

Reading about the destination you're visiting is one thing, but what about the flipside? Sophie goes on to talk about books that have really inspired her travel plans recently.

'I think the book that I had the most recently with was Tracy Chevalier's The Glassmaker… it just kind of transported me… into this kind of beautiful Italian Venetian setting.'

'I think it's the 1400s, in a very kind of old world Italy. But it just made me want to go there. These islands and all this glassblowing and this beautiful kind of setting that she created with her words and since then Venice, and particularly Murano, have been on my travel wishlist.'

The romance of Renaissance Italy is the perfect example of the kind of place that just effortlessly jumps from the pages into your imagination – it's no wonder that's the next spot on Sophie's travel bucket list.

Asked if any of Sophie's previous travels influenced her writing, she reflects on how living in France may have inspired her latest novel.

'It was only when I kind of look back, now that I can see that the original seeds for that novel were probably planted when I was a student, living in France and exploring that beautiful French Riviera. You know, going to Nice, going to Saint-Tropez, Cannes, Marseilles even, Aix en Provence.'

'All of these places showed up in my novel Madame Matisse. And it's really interesting to think about how your experiences travelling really settle in you and plant seeds and you're never quite sure how they're going to come out.'

'It makes me think, right I want to write a novel set in Tahiti,' she laughs.

Short stories for busy readers

You can start a short story as you're pouring a glass of rosé and you can get to the final word by the time you take the last sip

But just because you're on holiday it doesn't always mean you've got endless time to spare. Maybe you've got kids to keep an eye on or a busy schedule to follow. Sophie's answer? Short stories.

'I think that that's a really seductive reading experience because we're all so busy. Everybody's got so much going on. And just to read like a completely formed world in such a short amount of time is really powerful.'

'It gets you thinking, that's the point. Often these worlds linger in you long after you finish reading them.'

And the best part?

'The fact that they can be read on a commute or they can be read on a sunlounger, or they can be read while the kids are having a nap.'

We'll find your next holiday read

Tell us your favourite book, or where you're going on your next trip, and we'll come up with the perfect holiday read for you.

In Holiday Reads Jul 29, 2025

Ditch the guilt

Who better to get beach read recommendations from than a real author? While Sophie has already given us a big list of her faves, she actually had a really simple answer for this one.

'The book that you really wanna read. We feel so much tension and we do have guilty reads. We do have things we want to say that we love because we want to sound intelligent and we want to try and be reading something intellectually stimulating. But actually just that book that you want to pick up while you're on the sunlounger. I think sometimes we forget that books that are easy to read are just so compelling and addictive and fun.'

Pretty much exactly what makes a beach read perfect for a holiday. That also applies to audiobooks, which Sophie is keen to single out as a valid method of reading.

'Storytelling is storytelling and some people think that if you listen to an audiobook, it's not a book, you're not reading. But actually audiobooks are so brilliant and you can be going for a run, you can be doing the cleaning… I just think it really transports you.'

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If you want to hear more about Sophie's travels, including a trip to Chicago and a 50 plus-hour train journey into Tibet, make sure you watch the full video. Still need inspiration for your next beach read? Leave it to us.