On the wall of my writing room, I've usually got a set of post-it notes related to the project I'm working on. At the moment, instead, I've got four quotes from Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel. This is a complex, opinionated and fiercely intelligent book, which I somehow missed during the every-book-on-the-novel-known-to-humankind part of my English degree. In fact, I only read it for the first time a couple of months ago. This Guardian review from the time it was published gives a pretty good sense of the book and what it's trying to achieve (I particularly like the way they describe Kundera as 'flourish[ing] his cleverness like a matador's cape' !).

Readers won't always agree with Kundera's arguments. To put it simply: as with all books on craft, The Art of the Novel is supposedly a book about novels in general but is of course mostly about what Milan Kundera and a few carefully-selected others are trying to do with the novel. So it works best as one voice in a discussion, not THE voice. If you were to take the self-assurance of Kundera's book seriously, you would end up subscribing to a particular 'great man' sense of literature in which the important novelists are the ones who can be proved to be doing what Kundera says all novelists are doing (novelists who are mostly male, mostly central European). But novelists, like painters, work in a complex and pluralistic setting: they apprentice themselves to one school or movement out of many, they create their own innovations, combine forms, bring new subjects to the art that have not been treated before, cross genres and styles. I think the term 'novel' is often more helpful when it encompasses this plurality, not just one of its branches or traditions.

However, the questions the book is asking are important ones: questions about what people write about in novels, and why, and how they do it, and what it's all for anyway. These aren't questions that are easy to answer, but as a novelist it's pretty important at some point to consider them. And often, Kundera's answers struck a chord and I felt that he had discovered some truth about novel-writing that applies to most of us who see Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and their English counterparts, all those 'compassionate realists', as even distant ancestors. I wanted to remind myself of these thoughts once I'd finished reading the book. So I've put some of Milan Kundera's sentences about the novel on my wall, as a reminder to consider every day what I'm actually doing when I sit down at my desk.

Here is what they say:

I don't know why, but this feels like a good time to be writing - and a lot of it has to do with two writers in the headlines right now: Alice Munro and Eleanor Catton. I'm immensely cheered and energised by who has won the prizes this week, in a way I don't think I have been for a long time. These two very different authors have been recognised for their individual gifts, but their successes inevitably have an effect on everyone else working in the great continent of contemporary writing at the moment, and I'll try to explain why.

Firstly, the Nobel Prize: I was so glad the committee chose to honour Alice Munro, who is now 82 and has been a wonderful writer for her whole career. I've been a fan of her writing since I first read one of her stories. She writes about ordinary lives, with immense insight and grace. And I'm particularly inspired by this award because, inevitably, a prize with the status of the Nobel honours both a writer and a life's mission, a way of seeing and bearing witness to the world.

Margaret Thatcher et al. famously invented the 'trickle-down effect', the idea that if the wealthy get more wealthy, everyone else does. While it became painfully clear that this wasn't the case in economics, I do think it's partly the case in literature. In effect, if Alice Munro wins the Nobel Prize, other people who think that what she's writing about is worthwhile, and who strive to write similar stories at whatever level and in whatever mode, get a small boost from her success. Other, less prominent stories about ordinary lives, about the small person trying to make a better existence for themselves, are more likely to be published and to receive grants and prizes and be sold by booksellers and get into the hands of readers. This is good for the readers, and certainly good for the people who devote their careers to trying to write such stories. In recognising Alice Munro, the Nobel Prize committee have simultaneously honoured a gifted artist, and sent an encouraging message to the world that writing about ordinary people and ordinary lives is important.

Meanwhile, Eleanor Catton, 28, has won the Man Booker Prize. I was cheered, and unexpectedly moved, by this - particularly reading this interview in which she addresses the issue of her age and gender and firmly defends her right to be taken seriously. It isn't that her age is irrelevant, she suggests, but that the book has to remain the centre of attention, has to be addressed in its own right. I'm so glad she has used her new-found influence to say this, because I think it's an important message for everyone to hear.

Eleanor Catton, of course, is in a unique position to make this argument because she has just been recognised once and for all in her own right. Simply put, she won the Booker Prize not because she's young but because she's good. But as Catton is probably well aware, her recognition by the Booker judges and the comments she chooses to make while in the spotlight directly affect the status of writers in their 20s and 30s everywhere.

I'm 24, and my age has been a prominent issue for the past eight years of my career and probably will be for another 10, and I find her win and her comments immensely cheering. On the one hand, I'm convinced that literature needs young voices, old voices, all voices with something to say - and I've certainly never tried to hide my age or pretend to be older in interviews. (The only time I have done so is when my agent and later my publishers were first considering my work, because I wanted to be absolutely sure in my own mind that the book was being considered on its own merits.) But even though age is nothing to hide or ignore, the argument Eleanor Catton makes, on behalf of us all, is that age, like gender, is a biographical detail: it is relevant, and it might add something to the book, but it does not define the book. The book defines the book.

So in congratulating both these writers, I'm also grateful for what their wins mean for readers and writers everywhere - and hopeful about the future. Both of these writers are artists with something important to say. So thank you Alice Munro and Eleanor Catton for encouraging all of us, at whatever level of fame or obscurity, by saying it.