When Edmund de Waal published The Hare With Amber Eyes in 2010 it became an international success (and, incidentally, was our top-selling book for this year). Yet de Waal is also a prolific artist and academic; having studied pottery in both the UK and Japan, his porcelain is housed in museums and galleries across the world. The Pot Book – his latest publication on the culture, history and unexpected beauty of ceramics – has been in the works for several years and is something of a labour of love. Here, we chat to him about how the project came to be.

Tell us how The Pot Book first came about – what was the idea that sparked it and what did you envision?

I wanted to do The Pot Book quite simply because there wasn’t one. Writing about pots tends to be either fiercly academic or quite pedestrian, and I wanted to show the richness of the world of pots really dramatically and beautifully, and to present it in such a way that anyone can pick up the book and discover why pots are so wonderful.

This book has been several years in the making and it must have been a mammoth task to select the final 300 or so pieces featured – how did you go about sourcing each ceramic and style, and what drew you to the ones finally profiled?

The book contains work from the third millennium BC to 2010, and includes vessels obviously made by potters but also by architects, industrial designers and artists, from Gauguin to Grayson Perry. I want the book to reveal the scope of extraordinarily diverse people who have made pots throughout time. I started with a list of my top 600 pots that were non-negotiable, which after a lot of reasoning backwards and forwards – became the essential 300.

The layout of the book is beautiful – can you tell us what kind of look or aesthetic informed your choices for the overall design?

I am very proud of this book; I think it is beautiful. What I particularly love is opening any page and seeing one pot on one page and a completely different one on the opposite page because the pots are arranged alphabetically rather than chronologically or by style. The random pairings produce such interesting combinations; two pots that would never have been in the same company before and maybe never again.

Apart from an author, you are also a widely successful artist and academic – how did you reconcile these two professions, day-to-day, while writing The Pot Book?

I started this in 2006 so it has been quite a labour of love, which I have been doing alongside my own work in my studio.

Lastly, what sense do you hope to leave readers with, both in terms of the artworks and their cumulative history, after finishing the book?

There is a wonderful collection of photographs at the back of the book showing people making pots and handling them, and among these is a picture of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei smashing a pot. I think that is a fantastic image: here you have possibly the most politicised contemporary artist whose work is a commentary on Chinese culture and what does he do? He breaks an iconic Chinese pot. I think that act shows just how deep pottery runs through culture.

Jessica Au is from Readings St Kilda and is the author of Cargo.