In the latest episode of Influential, US writer Ann Patchett shares how seeing kindness around her influences the way she approaches her characters.

The world needs "life-changing books", Ann Patchett once wrote in an essay in The New York Times. She wasn't referring to her own works, yet admirers of the best-selling US author would argue that this is exactly what she has achieved, with acclaimed novels including Bel Canto, and the Pulitzer Prize-shortlisted The Dutch House, along with her award-winning 2005 memoir, Truth and Beauty: A Friendship.

Patchett, who cites John Updike and Roxane Gay as influences on her deep body of work, brushes off praise. Reflecting on her books, she says that it took her years to finally feel like she was a successful writer, even when The New York Times included the prize-winning 2001 novel Bel Canto in its best books of the 21st Century list.

"I just didn't think you could make art and be successful," she tells the BBC's Katty Kay. They sat down at Parnassus Books, the bookshop Patchett she opened in 2011 in Nashville, Tennessee, a city which is also the setting for her 1992 novel The Patron Saint of Liars and her 2013 memoir-fiction hybrid, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. "[It] never occurred to me."

Some may see an author opening a bookshop as self-serving, but Patchett explains that she approached it like a civic duty. She didn't want to live in a city without one, and after she saw her local bookshops shutting, she co-founded her own.

"It wasn't that I wanted to open a bookstore – I really fell into it backwards," she says. "It's been a wonderful thing. It's been a huge joy."

Patchett rose to prominence in the world of fiction, crafting stories that brought together unexpected situations, and even more unexpected characters. Take, for instance, the home for unwed mothers in The Patron Saint of Liars or the depths of the Amazon rainforest in 2011's State of Wonder. She describes the scenarios in her books as "people in confinement", even though the stories span everything from events on a meditation retreat to hostage situations – and her own memoirs.

"The setting is the fun," she says of that commonality, though she's quick to point out that there's........

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