The literary world is packed with novelists reviewing the books of their colleagues but it is not something Kate Atkinson would do, calling it a “callous art”.

“I think it is a really unpleasant process to be reviewed. I would never review another writer unless it was a book I thought was the best book ever written. I think it is a callous art a lot of the time,” she told the Cheltenham literature festival.

She said she “sort of” read her reviews, adding: “I try not to read bad reviews and I try not to read Amazon readers. If it is a guaranteed good review I’ll read it but there’s always something that you think … you’re wrong.”

Atkinson, the author of Behind the Scenes at the Museum, is a bestselling novelist and multiple prize winner including two Costa novel awards for Life After Life and its follow-up, A God in Ruins.

A new Atkinson novel is an event which is why the New Yorker magazine recently devoted nearly 3,000 words to a review of her latest second world war spy drama, Transcription.

Atkinson said the review by the American novelist Jonathan Dee baffled her.

Dee argued: “Any new British novel at this particular moment must emerge, it seems, in the shadow of Rachel Cusk.”

Cusk, like novelists including Karl Ove Knausgaard and Edward St Aubyn, is an exponent of “autofiction” using only her own life story. In an interview with the Observer she once called making stuff up “fake and embarrassing”.

Atkinson called Dee’s review bizarre. “He was making a whole article out of me not being Rachel Cusk, thousands of words. That she was an avant garde writer and I was a traditionalist writer. [It was] a strange and very good review of the book, a very big review, and yet also with many subtle nuances of sexism.

“He referred to me as a matron, for example, which is not just sexist but also ageist. It was just a really peculiar article that I didn’t understand in the end.”

Atkinson said she was happy to use her imagination. “I like characters and I like plot and I like structure so I like all the quite old fashioned bones of what makes a novel and I think on the whole, that’s what people want to read – it’s what I want to read.”

Unlike many writers, Atkinson refuses to get involved in social media. “I just have no desire at all to display my thoughts or my feelings to people, to me that’s a very private thing.”